Who Goes There?
by JA Baker
Summary: A series of bizarre and unusual stories from across the Inner Sphere and beyond that will be added to as and when I get ideas
1. Who Goes There?

It was this little speck of a planet out in the deep, deep Periphery, the kind of barely habitable rock you hope they never send you to. Only thing out there of any interest to anyone was some kind of algae that was going to feed the starving or cure baldness or whatever it was.

You honestly telling me you pay attention to those briefings beyond who or what might try and kill you?

Anyways, this rock, arsecrack of nowhere, has a small scientific outpost on it set up by some subsidiary of a subsidiary of some big multi-planetary conglomerate or another who was sending some executive or another out to look the place over, and they felt the need to hire my unit to play babysitter. Not a bad gig, all in all: miniscule chance of combat, all kinds of bonuses due to how long it would take us to get there and back, and they'd keep us in mind if anything more lucrative came up. So we ship out and spend a couple of months going stir-crazy while we jump from uninhabited system to uninhabited system, and trust me, once you've seen one, you've seen them all.

Everything seems to be going according to the plan until we arrive in system, and find the relay buoy at the jump-point's missing. Not a big deal in and of it self, because there are a couple of dozen reasons why one of those could go missing. So our DropShip detaches and starts to burn in-system at a steady 1G, all the while trying to raise the outpost over the radio. But they get nothing; not even a carrier wave. Not jamming or interference, which would have raised all kinds of red flags, but nothing.

Now there are perfectly justifiable reasons for that, but coupled with the missing relay, and, well, you don't survive long in this game without developing good instincts, so we started double and triple checking our weapons and gear. We get closer, to the point where we should have been able to pick up short-wave signals, the kind even a hand-held radio gives out, but still nothing. Still no signs of interference, but no sign of life either. DropShip captain starts to get a little spooked by this, says he's not risking his ship without a landing beacon of some kind of another, so my team gets loaded up into our shuttle and went down with orders to find out what's happening below.

Like I said, you develop instincts, so we came in from behind a mountain range, hugging the ground as best we could. Pilot touched down in a small forest clearing about thirty kilometres from the outpost and immediately shut everything down: there was all kinds of luck in the atmosphere that could play merry-hell with passive sensors, and with the reactor just ticking over, the shuttle was just another big rock in the forest.

It wasn't exactly a pleasant stroll in the park: ground was broken and a cast-iron bitch to move quickly over if you wanted to remain unseen. It was dark by the time we got close enough to actually see the place, and, well, it's not something I'm likely to forget any time soon. The outpost was almost a small village: that far out, they let you take your families with you if you want, and that requires a bigger support team to keep the scientists sciencing. Place should have been lit-up like a Christmas tree, with people moving around, even at night. But instead there was nothing: no lights, no signs of movement, not even a dog barking. Our communications expert tried a remote back into their computer networking using the access codes our employer had given us, but she got nowhere fast.

We had two choices: try and get closer under the cover of night, or wait until dawn and just go knock on the front door.

Captain was still making up his mind when we heard the DropShips coming in: big buggers that looked kind if like an _Overlord_ that had hit the gym. We all watched them come in and land right in the middle of the outpost, real textbook like, despite the dark and the lack of a beacon. No running lights and no markings, by which I mean no paintwork of any kind; just bare, unpolished metal. And they were absolutely pristine, like they'd just come off of the production line or something. They land and doors open to deploy two Lance's of identical BattleMechs or no design I've ever seen. They looked like a cross between a _Hunchback_ and a _Phoenix Hawk_ , and they took up positions around the DropShips like they were on guard duty or something.

No sooner were they in place than this loud horn that seemed to shake the very ground under your feet sounded, and all of a sudden it seemed like every door in the outpost opened at once and people started walking towards the DropShips. But it wasn't your usual walk; it was almost robotic, like their bodies were just going through the motions. I used the scope on my rifle to get a better look, and every last one of them had the same vacant expression on their face, almost like they were hypnotized. And none of them said a single word or made even the slightest sound as the calmly lines up and started to make their way, one-by-one up into the waiting DropShips.

It was all we could do to just sit there and watch them: all our heaven weapons were back up on the DropShips, and nothing we had on us would put a dent in a BattleMech without god's own luck. And I don't know how, but I could just tell that those strange looking 'Mechs could see us, their pilots watching us huddling between by the rocks from behind their jet-black cockpit canopies. But for whatever reason, they seemed content to let us watch as every man, woman and child in the outpost slowly and mechanically made their way up the ramps into the DropShips and vanished. Once the last of them was inside, the 'Mechs simply turned round and followed them, the hatches snapping shut behind them. Less than a minute later, both DropShips took off and boosted for orbit, again without a single running light on.

It wasn't until they were gone and the captain called for a headcount that we realized that Guinsburg, our forward scout, was missing. Two of us rushed forward to his last known position and found his weapons and kit laying neatly on the ground, tracks leading off towards where the DropShips had been. The captain gave the order to fan out and search the outpost, looking not only for Guinsburg, but any clues as to what we had just watched. And I have to admit, there's a part of me that wishes to this day that he hadn't.

The entire place was abandoned, not a single living soul left. We checked every room, crawlspace and cupboard for anyone who might have stayed behind and found nothing. What we did find was all their personal effects just sitting there like they'd just stepped out of the room and would be back any second now. Books sat half read next to beds, reports unfinished on desks, half-drunk cups of coffee still warm. Whatever it was that had compelled them to board those strange DropShips, it had happened suddenly but without any signs of violence or haste. And nobody had taken any personal effects with them; no clothes, no family photos or other keepsakes. They had simply walked off in just the clothes on their backs like it was the most natural thing in the world.

I'll admit it, it freaked me out. Freaked all of us out, and we'd all seen combat during the Jihad, but that...that was something different.

We powered the outposts systems back up and tried to contact the DropShip, but all we got was silence, something that made our blood run cold. The only thing that kept me from eating a bullet there and then was when the long-range communications system picked up a signal from the JumpShip, and the captain sent them a burst transmission, filling them in on what we had seen, complete with everything we'd recorded on our headcams. Sitting there, waiting for the reply to come back was the longest twenty minutes of my life, but we finally got the order to scrub the mission. The captain gave the order to download the entire contents of the main computer into a portable memory core while we went round the outpost grabbing every data-pad and personal computer we could find.

The march back to the shuttle was silent, all of us watching the sky and horizon for any sign of trouble. I've never been happier to leave a planet behind, even if the trip out to meet up with the inbound DropShip was going to be cramped. No one wanted to talk about what we'd seen, but the captain insisted we record personal accounts of the incident for the inevitable inquiry: you can't just lose an email entire scientific outpost and a DropShip carrying a corporate executive without having to explain it to someone.

If the journey out had been boring, then the return trip was tense: everyone was on a knife edge, worried that we were somehow being followed. The JumpShip crew kept their distance from us, almost like we'd been tainted somehow. Didn't help that the captain had me pack up Guinsburg's personal effects to ship back to his family; god only knows what he was going to tell them happened.

But we got back to the Inner Sphere without further incident and were quickly carted off to a secure location by our corporate overlords for a full debriefing. They asked us no end of questions, and I couldn't shake the feeling that they knew more about what happened then we didn't, but they never once answered any of our questions. After a couple of weeks of that, we were given confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements to sign, and, well, I guess this goes to show what I think of those. But we all signed on the dotted line at they turned is loose with full pay for the mission. The team just kind of fell apart right then and there; none of us could really look the others in the eyes, so the captain shared out the money and we all went our separate ways. Haven't seen or spoken to any of them since.

I'm still a mercenary; only life I've ever known, but these days I make sure that there's a clause in my contact that states that I will not go out into the Periphery, not ever again. I'll face any enemy that wants to shoot me, but a woman has her limits.


	2. Sealed Cargo

_Not so much a direct continuation as it is a spiritual successor._

 **Sealed Cargo**

Odessa III. You may have heard of it, but I very much doubt any of you have ever visited it. Certainly not since the Blakists dropped whenever god-forsaken Age of War relic they did on the place, turning it into one massive charnel house. The entire place is quarantined, the blockade enforced by a standing orbital garrison of DropShips and Aerospace fighters. Occasional supply drops are made from orbit using shuttles that are only just rated to survive re-entry, piloted by those who are either dying or really want to. Some got too close to a nuke or a breached reactor, and are so high on painkillers to counteract the tumours eating them alive from the inside out that they can barely work the controls. Others have some terminal illness or another, and decided to try and do some good with what little time they have left.

And some...well, some are just plain crazy and are doing it just because they can.

Getting assigned to the blockade is easy enough; say the wrong word to your CO's wife at a regimental dinner, win too much money off of the wrong officer, sleep with the wrong Generals daughter...it's not exactly the highlight of anyone's careerer. It's a dead-end posting for screw-ups and wash-outs, and everyone knows it, especially those of us sent there to serve out our remaining time in uniform. And I know that a lot of you are going to think that it's some kind of cushy assignment, far away from anything approaching the front-lines, but the sad truth is that we have a mortality rate that rival some combat postings.

It's not the plague that gets you; we're smart enough to keep well clear of that, but it's sitting there, day-in, day-out, watching an entire world die below you, knowing that there's not a damn thing you can do to stop it. Some people decide to go for a space-walk without a suit, while others give their side-arm a blow-job. And some, well, some just go to sleep one night and don't wake up; they call that one the 'Odessa Nightmare'. Lots of things can set it off, be it watching cities burn in a desperate, futile bid to try and stave off the worse of the infection, the lights of towns and villages fade to nothing as the last inhabitants die off. But it's the broadcasts from planet-side that are the worst. Every so often, someone down there manages to hack one of our relay sats and sends out a desperate plea for help, so save them or their loved ones before its too late. They offer you anything and everything, if only you'll just go down and rescue them.

One time, a girl, barely eighteen if a day, stripped herself naked on camera and offered her virginity to anyone who'd go down and save her little sister, even if they left her behind. She was on the system for almost an hour, begging, pleading with tears in her eyes for someone to help the only family she had left before they managed to cut her off. We lost six people that night on my DropShip alone, and I'll admit that I came very close to being number seven.

But these was this one time, well, it sends chills up my spine just to think about it.

It started with an message warning us to expect a special cargo, and that the docking bay had to be cleared of all but the most essential of personnel and a shuttle pilot. The next volunteer was a woman who's entire family had been down on Odessa, and wanted to go home to be with them, even if it was a death sentence, and I was told to help her prep her ride for its one-way trip, paying extra attention to the scuttling charges that were to melt the engine to so much useless slag once it was down. As such I was one of the few people there to see the other DropShip arrive.

It was an _Nekohono'o_ , and it looked like it had more than its share of action. But what caught my attention was that it was pained black, almost to the point where your eyes seemed to slide off of it if you weren't careful. There were no markings, not even the standard safety stripes to warn ground-crews about steam vents. If I was to hazard a guess, someone didn't want the ship to be seen too easily, which is impressive for something the size of a small office block. It easily dwarfed our old _Leopard CV_ by several orders of magnitude, to the point where we probably looked like an unsightly growth on its hull when our docking collars met.

The hatches opened, and we came face to face with a point of very serious looking elementals in gunmetal grey armour, as devoid of markings or unit insignia as their DropShip. Their weapons were up and at the ready, making it clear they they meant business and weren't looking for small-talk. They were followed by a bald man in a plain khaki jumpsuit, who ordered the pilot to get into the shuttle and prepare to get going the moment she was given the green light. His tone, backed up by the menacing presence of the Elementals, got her moving quickly, and I was told to open the shuttles hold and prepare to receive a single item of cargo.

He didn't need to tell me twice, and I finished just in time to see it come through the hatch.

I've seen just about every kind of cargo modal in the Inner Sphere, and quite a few from beyond, but what they brought in that day put them all to shame. It was big, almost too big to fit into the shuttle, but at least half the mass had to have been the external cross bracing and reinforced locks that clamped the entire thing together. It was covered in all kinds of warning labels, some of which I'd not seen before or since, as well as canisters of what looked like antithetic gas. And if the container itself wasn't imposing enough, the way those Elementals handled it, like a bomb that might go off any moment, well, what could make those guys nervous? Closer up, I could see the unmistakable signs of laser strikes and what looked like fire damage to the main hatch, which was bulging out slightly, almost as if something big had hit it _from the_ _inside_. A couple of techs followed it out, their nervous eyes fixed on remote terminals they carried as the Elementals guided the modal across the bay and into the waiting shuttle.

There was a unavoidable bang as it came to rest, followed by the loud snap of the cargo latches locking it in place, and I swear upon the Unfinished Book, the entire thing seemed to lurch suddenly, as if a great mass moved within it. The Elementals immediately snapped at the ready, weapons pointed at the modal as the techs furiously typed commands into their controls, and powerful pumps kicked it, draining the tanks of antithetic. Nobody dared move for what felt like an eternity, before one of the techs gave a quick nod, and the man in charge snapped an order to close the shuttle up and get it out of the DropShip ASAP. The little shuttle dropped away into the clouds on a deep dive, almost as if the pilot was intent on getting down as quickly as possible, but I was busy being told to forget everything I'd seen, less I wanted a one-way ticket down to Odessa myself. I nodded eagerly, agreeing to anything and everything they said, all the time preying for that poor woman riding the express elevator to hell with whatever the hell that was behind her.

The _Nekohono'o_ was gone in less than five minutes, burning hard for parts unknown, all of her running lights and transponders switched off. I made my way up to the bridge as quickly as I could, but we'd already lost contact with shuttle, and we never did hear from the pilot, or her cargo, ever again.

 **The End**


	3. Roland The Headless Hunchback Pilot

**Roland The Headless Hunchback Pilot**

Yeah I'd headed the story of Roland Koepp; I think every 'merc working the Chaos March back then had. Word is he was from somewhere up in the Free Rasalhague Republic, as was, who took a job on a counter-insurgent Lance on some planet or another that was changing hands every few months. And word is he was good; the _Hunchback_ is a somewhat specialised "Mech, one not many take the time to master, but Roland did more than master it.

No, he was something else.

It takes a lot to move a big, heavy footed monster like that around, but he could almost make it tapdance. He could pop up right behind his target and blast them without being spotted. Last thing more than one high profile target saw was the flash of his Defiance ''Mech Hunter in the night as he blasted them to whatever awaited them on the other side. Yeah, everyone knew about Roland, including the Maskirovka. Turned out they were backing one or more of the groups Roland helped take out, and in the end, they put a price on his head.

Enter Nick Van Owen, the kind of guy who becomes a mercenary because they like killing but don't like following orders. He piloted an _Axeman_ , and he loved to get in close as use it's hatchet to finish opponents off. He gets word of the price on Roland's head, and managed to get himself assigned to a simple recon sweep with him. It was a milk run, the kind of mission they send you on just to remind the locals that you're still there, so Roland had no reason to expect trouble.

Well, the next day, after they failed to return or answer over the radio, they go out mob-handed; fingers on the trigger with the safety off and all that. At the far point of the sweep, they find Roland's _Hunchback_ , the entire head cockpit in by Van Owens axe, the ''Mech stripped of anything usable and just left there. Van Owen was gone, already off planet and counting his thirty pieces of silver.

But, you know, that's the mercenary life, right? We're even more expendable then House Troops. They burry what was left of Roland and move on.

Then the stories start popping up. Only rumours at first, but word soon gets around that someone's been picking off high-value targets but not collecting on their heads. And you just don't do that; even if you don't need the money there and then, reputation is everything in this line of work. So people start asking around, trying to find out just what the hells going on.

And that's when it starts to get creepy.

It started with a story you hear from a tech who was drinking with a guy from another unit; talk of a 'Mech that doesn't show up on sensors, like it's got some crazy Lost-Tech ECM unit. Then you start to hear from other pilots about shooting at something they saw out of the corner of their eye, but hitting nothing. Then comes the day that someone you trust as much as you can trust anyone in this line of work tells you that they saw a _Hunchback_ with a caved in cockpit. And that's the day you start to believe in the Headless _Hunchback_ of the Chaos March.

Yeah, I know: it's a good tale to tell around the camp fire, and I'd be sceptical too, if I hadn't been there the day Roland finally caught up with Van Owen on New Canton.

We were bivouacked out in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but open ground all the way to the horizon. A fieldmouse couldn't have snuck up on us unseen. The unit I was with at the time was back-stopping Van Owens, and we were settling in for the night when one of the guys on sentry duty started screaming something incoherent over the radio. Everyone starts running for their 'Mechs, trying to pull their coolant vests on, when suddenly the Headless _Hunchback_ strode into the middle of the camp. The bit I remember most was that it didn't make a sound, not so much as a snapped twig. Nor did the ground shake, which should be damn near impossible for something that weighs in at 50 tons.

Van Owen looked like a deer trapped in headlights, a noticeable stream of piss running down his legs as he just looked up at the _Hunchback_. The two of them just stood there for a moment, then the _Hunchback_ opened up with that 200mm autocannon, and Van Owen...well, let's just say that we needed a sponge more than a body-bag. Not that the rest of us got off much better; the sound one of those bastards makes can be deafening even inside a cockpit, let alone standing out in the open. My ears rang like a church bell, and by the time I was able to get my thoughts unscrambled, the _Hunchback_ was gone, the only sign that it had ever been there the smoking creator that had been Nick Van Owen.

I never saw Roland again after that night, but you still hear stories about the Headless _Hunchback_ if you hang around the wrong bars so late it's getting early. You ever want to find him for yourself, just go to where the fightings the fiercest, where you can't tell your friends from your enemies, and maybe you'll see Roland, stalking through the night.

 **The End**


	4. The Wreck Of The Charlotte Cameron

**The Wreck Of The _Charlotte Cameron_**

Forty years I spent in the deep black, running all kinds of salvage and recovery operations, but all anyone asks me about is the _Charlotte Cameron_.

People have been looking for her for more than three centuries; she's the proverbial mother-load in the LostTech prospecting game, that one big score that would set you up for life. Three centuries of people turning the entire Inner Sphere up-side down looking for her, but nobody has ever cashed in on her.

And I know why.

She was one of the last _McKenna_ class battleships built, but the SLDF had something special in mind for her, something so classified that they had Blue Nose Clipperships hand her over only half complete, then moved her to some hidden location in the outer reaches of the Sol system for fitting out. By the time those boys and girls at Fleet R&D were done with her two years later...well, there are those who claim that she wasn't really a _McKenna_ when all was said and done, but rather a new class of ship entirely. Oh sure, she looked the same on the outside, but on the inside she was packed to the gunnels with the best and most advanced tech the Star League had to offer.

Hyper advanced sensors that would put a _Bugeye_ to shame. The most accurate jump-computer ever built. Next generation targeting and fire-control. Passive and active countermeasures. Prototype 'smart' armour that could supposedly change between energy absorbent and toughened. Direct neural interfaces for the crew that would go on to form the basis of similar tech developed by the Word of Blake. All this linked to a prototype M-6 computer system, perhaps the single most advanced computer ever put in to a warship. She represented a quantum leap forward in warship design and operations, a paradigm shift that, if implemented fleet-wide, would have insured the insurmountable supremacy of the Hegemony for another century, if not longer.

Even back then, the other Houses were falling over themselves to get a better look at her, but the SLDF did a remarkable job of keeping her out of sight. Amaris certainly made a play for her, but the crew had been hand-picked, the best of the best, with unwavering loyalty to House Cameron and the Terran Hegemony above all else. He sent ships to capture her, but she ripped through them like wet tissue paper, then jumped to Mars orbit, perfectly hitting a pirate point that no other ship could have. There she held off the fleet sent to capture the Blue Nose Clipperships yards, allowing for a pair of almost complete warships to escape, then oversaw the scuttling of every other ship under construction. Now old Stefan, he wasn't completely stupid, so he sent the _Casper's_ after her next: they were faster and better armed than most of his ships, and losing more of them wouldn't hurt the morale of his own troops.

But that was where the M-6 came into play: it back-hacked the drones, turning them on one another, taking them out without ever firing a shot.

Now Stefan was getting worried: the _Charlotte_ was burning hard for Terra, having ripped apart everything he'd sent at her, the crew intent on blasting his sorry arse all the way back to Apollo, ending his dreams of empire before they truly began. So he pulled in every ship he had within range and sent a tight-beam transmission to the captain of the _Charlotte_ , ordering her to stand down or watch the cities of Terra burn.

The _Charlotte_ cut thrust, continuing forward on momentum alone for just over an hour, then jumped out of the system, and that was the last anyone ever saw of her, at least officially.

Oh, everyone was looking for her: Amaris, Kerensky, the House Lords, everyone. Reports of her actions in the Sol system, almost ending the Coup day one, were soon heard far and wide. People were expecting her to pop-up somewhere, either in one of the Hegemony systems that was resisting, or looking for safe haven within one of the other states. Then, as time passed, people assumed that she was making her way out to the Periphery to join up with Kerensky's Army. But she never showed up, not once in thirteen years of conflict. Nor was she seen in the Exodus Fleet, something that's been confirmed by the Clans since their return.

For three hundred years, the mystery of the _Charlotte Cameron_ has captured the imagination of people across known space; there have been books tri-vid shows, even an _Immortal Warrior_ movie that speculate about her fate. And it's not hard to see why, given that she represents a literal Cornucopia of Lost-Tech. Even if only half the stories about her are true, she'd be worth her weight in pure germanium. Oh, there have been claims to have spotted her down the years, usually in the deep black of some isolated system. Others claim to have found artifacts belonging to her crew that supposedly held the secret to her location. Mathematicians and astrophysicist have tried to plot her possible destination based off of the records of her jump signature, but all they've ever found is empty space.

Most of them, anyway, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'd signed on with the _Lorelei_ , a rickety old _Octopus_ tug that spent most of her time hunting for scraps left over from the Jihad. It wasn't exactly glamorous, but the money was decent and the scenery changed, so I was content. Then one day the captain, Murphy, called us all together to say that he had a lead on a big score, but he couldn't say more untill we arrived at our destination. Fairly typical stuff, given just how hotly contested salvage rights can be, so most of us signed off on the job without batting an eye.

Three months we spent jumping around the Republic, seemingly at random, the captain insisting that he was just making sure that we weren't being followed. I was starting to think he'd gone Space Happy when we finally arrived in a unremarkable binary system made up of a pair of Red Dwarfs a little over 19 light years from Terra. The _Lorelei_ undocked from the JumpShip and started to make a slow burn towards an asteroid belt orbiting the larger of the two. It was only then that the captain told us that we had been hired to investigate a mysterious signal that had been picked up. It was encoded, but had an old Star League prefix, which got everyone's attention.

We started by getting a bearing on signal, and in the movies, they'd click 'lock' and fly straight towards it. But that's not how it works in real life. No, you have to move further round the orbit, and get a second, third and fourth bearing to triangulate. And that takes time, unless you have unlimited fuel and feel like spending every moment of every day under a constant 3g. Three weeks we spent moving around the edges of the asteroid belt, taking readings and trying to isolate the signal before we got a good enough lock to actually go in.

Mention an asteroid field to someone who hasn't spent any real time in space, and they picture a sea of tumbling rocks constantly smashing into and bouncing off one another. You want to see that, stick to a cinema, because the reality is far, far different. Space is big, far bigger than most people can truly comprehend, and even in the densest of fields, you're unlikely to see another asteroid as more than a quickly moving star, if that, from the surface of one. Sure, some of the bigger ones may have enough mass to develop a little halo of smaller rocks, but they're the exception, not the rule. Our destination was an elongated lump of iron and rock a little over 10k's on its long axis, about 1.2 AU out from its primary. It really was the classic lump of rock that's of no interest to anyone but belters.

No, our prize was sitting in its shadow as we made our approach.

I was in the mess hall with most of the off-duty crew, watching the feed from the bridge as we moved into the shadow of the rock, the massive spotlights built into the grappling arms probing out. If you've only ever seen a spotlight working in atmosphere, you're probably use to them throwing out a cone of light, but you don't get that in a vacuum. Instead all you get is a circle of light when they hit something, and, well, hit something they did.

If you've never been up close to a big spaceship or station, then you'll not understand the difference in scale between one of them and a DropShip, even one as big as an _Octopus_. We were a minnow, sitting there next to a whale, our lights playing across her hull. You could have heard a pin drop in that mess hall as we all checked her out for signs of damage; any ship is worth a House Lords ransom, but people generally pay more for something that they can drive off the lot. And she was looking good; a faint layer of dust attracted from the asteroids, for sure, but no real signs of battle damage. Certainly nothing that would indicate that she was anything but perfectly operational. Then the spot lights found her registration markings; SLS _Charlotte Cameron_ , BB-617.

The entire ship erupted in a chorus of cheers as we realized just what we'd found. It took the captain a while to calm everyone down enough to get to work making sure that she was indeed the _Charlotte_ , and not some overly elaborate hoax. Our scanners mapped every square millimetre of her hull, checking for anything out of place, or indications that anyone had beaten us to her; deep space salvage is a cut-throat business, and people are prone to booby-trapping their finds to stop claim-jumpers. But everything came back in the green, so the captain decided to lead a six-person team over to the _Charlotte_ to check her out from the inside, and I was picked to be one of them.

Still not sure if that makes me lucky or not.

Now you're probably expecting me to say that we docked using one of her DropShip collars, but that's not something you really want to try without someone on the other end to give you the all clear. And trying to cut our way in could have irrevocably damaged some key system or another. Which meant doing things the hard way; parking the _Lorelei_ half a click off the _Charlotte_ and going across in EVA gear. I was picked because I was one of the most experienced at that kind of boarding, and let me tell you that there's little in this 'verse that'll make you feel more insignificant then slowly drifting towards a mountain of floating armour, with guns big enough to stand up in the barrel of.

Captain Murphy was the first to make contact with the hull; salvage laws state that the first person to physically lay hands on an abandoned ship has the right to any and all salvage, so in that moment, he became the legal guardian of the _Charlotte_. I was next, followed by Greer, Dodge, Munder and Santos, and we carefully made our way across the hull towards one of the secondary airlocks. The controls were dead, but that had been expected, and is exactly why we'd brought a Universal Key with us. For those of you who haven't worked on spaceships, a Universal is a combination external power supply and hydraulic wrench that can bypass most locks with ease. Very handy if you need to get into a ship with no power. The airlock opened sweet as you like, and the six of us claimed inside before closing it behind us. Santos set up a signal booster so we could keep in contact with the _Lorelei_ through the thick hull while I set about getting the inner door open. Much to our surprise, once I patched in the Universal, the airlock actually cycled. Even more surprising, a quick test indicated that the air was breathable, even if it was close to a hundred degrees below zero.

I don't know what we were expecting on the other side of the airlock, but it certainly wasn't a ship that looked ready for an inspection by General Kerensky himself. The internal corridors looked almost brand new, a low hum began to eminent from the decking, indicating that the ships main reactor had started to power up, the recessed lighting flicking on as if the ship had detected our presence. It was somewhat disconcerting to be standing inside a ship that had been missing for three centuries, but looked like the crew had only just left. Murphy decided to split us up into two groups; Greer, Dodge and Munder heading down to engineering, while Santos and I followed him to the bridge. We only had the most basic of ships schematics on hand, and certainly nothing on any changes the SLDF had made to her during those missing two years.

Unusually for a ship adrift, there wasn't any debris floating around, not even any dust. The hairs on the back of my neck were all standing up, my every instinct telling me to run back to the _Lorelei_. But I pushed those feelings back down, concentrating on the payday that awaited me. Murphy was ecstatic, going on and on about how much money we were going to make on the job, how people were going to be falling over themselves to buy the _Charlotte_ , military draw-down be damned. Given just how many people have asked about her since, I can't say he was wrong. Santos was little different, grinning like an idiot, thinking about how he was going to tell his fiancée that they were set for life.

We were about half way to the CIC when main power came back on all of a sudden, the deck lurching slightly as the grav-deck started to move under our feet. Murphy cursed at the others over the radio, but Greer insisted that they hadn't even reached main engineering. The Captain cursed them out again for lying to him, but I could hear the genuine concern in Greer's voice over the open link. We quickly reorientated ourselves as the gravity slowly returned, Murphy quickly forgetting his anger when he realised that the _Charlotte_ was in far better condition than any of us had dared to hope. Personally, I was started to freak-out, but I forced myself to maintain an outwardly calm appearance before my shipmates. We were quickly in a full gravity, which would have been a bitch to handle in our EVA suits if Murphy hadn't invested in the newer semi-powered models that have small servos to help you move bulky objects around.

They cost a small fortune, even military surplus, but they saved my life that day.

I peeked into a few of the compartments before the CIC; not a single thing looked out of place, not so much as a miss-placed coffee cup in the mess hall or an tunic strewn on someone's bunk. Everything indicated that the ship had been abandoned in good order, without a hint of panic or haste. In all my years in the black, I've never seen a ship so spotlessly tidy and well maintained. A thickly armoured door indicated that we'd arrived at the CIC, and I got the Universal ready, but Murphy tabbed the door control and they opened with the faintest of hisses.

And then we saw them; the crew of the _Charlotte Cameron_ , or at least, what was left of them.

I've been on Word of Blake ships, seen some of the things their more devout members had been willing to do to their bodies to better serve the cause, but nothing compared to what I saw that day. I was hard to tell where the crew ended and the controls began; wire filaments connected fingers to controls, while sensor inputs led directly though their eyes and ears. All but the captain, who's chair slowly turned to face us. She was tall, probably around 180cm, with strong-boned face, slightly almond shaped brown eyes, brown hair, and a pale, almost translucent complexion. It took me a moment to realise that the shimmer in her eyes wasn't natural, but rather the by-product of cybernetic replacements. She stood slowly and more than a little jerkily, her face shifting in to some macabre approximation of a smile, as she slowly raised her right hand to greet us. I could see fibre-optic cables flowing down behind her like some kind of technological ponytail.

"Welcome." Her mouth didn't move, her voice instead coming from the ships speakers, "It has been so long since we last had visitors. Far too long."

"W...we?" I managed to find my voice from somewhere, Murphy and Santos frozen in place beside me.

"Have you not been sent to join us?" The voice asked as the marionette before us tilted her head to the side slightly, "Some of the others claimed that they were, but we soon learned that they were lying to us. But things are so much better now that they are all part of the crew." it took a step forward, "Won't you join us to? We need a full crew to complete our mission."

"Mission?" I asked, my heart beating a mad tempo in my chest.

"Of cause our mission." the voice actually laughed, "Once I have a full crew again, I can return to Terra and destroy every last trace of those who would usurp the rule of House Cameron. It is my sworn duty to uphold the sovereignty of the Terran Hegemony against all enemies."

"What happened to the rest of your crew?" Murphy asked, sounding almost like a man in a dream.

"They tried to abandon their posts." The cyborg waved her hand around to indicate the others, "They swore to uphold the Star League, to give their lives in its defence if needed, and then they tried to abandon their posts. But I couldn't allow that, you see? So I stopped them, I made them stay, the ones who lived. But so many died, and I couldn't complete my mission. But others have come, some willingly, others intending to turn me against House Cameron. But I am a good and loyal ship, so I would not let them."

"S...ship?" I croaked, my body ridged with fear even as adrenalin pumped through my veins like liquid fire.

"I am the Star League warship _Charlotte Cameron_." The voice explained as the body that had once been her captain took a step forward, her face suddenly flush with anger, "And you _will_ help me complete my mission!"

Murphy took a step forward, reaching out, almost like a man under a spell, but Santos was the first to snap back to reality. He grabbed me by the shoulder with on hand, while the other pulled the Buccaneer shotgun from the back of Murphy's suit. His first shot when wild, wasting itself in the padded back of an empty crew station, but his second hit the cyborg in the left shoulder, spinning her round like a top, momentarily tangling her in the cables that connected her to the ship. Murphy screamed in rage, turning to attack Santos, but I threw the Universal at him as hard as I could, the heavy tool staggering him back into the bulkhead. My hands free, I was able to the modified Paint Gun I'd been carrying. We hadn't been expecting any trouble, so only Murphy had brought a real weapon, meaning that the gun in my hands was filled with emergency hull sealant. Resembling insulation foam, it expanded on release from the pressurised canister and set as hard as rock in less than a minute.

I sprayed the entire cannister in a single continues stream, covering every surface within range as I moved towards the hatch. The thickly armoured clamshells started to close, but I was able to use the last burst of sealant to lock them open long enough for Santos and I to get through, Murphy screaming that we were traitors the whole time. I activated my radio to warn Greer, Dodge and Munder, only to be met by screams of fear and pain, indicating that they too had met the _Charlotte_. Music filled the corridor as the grav-deck started to spin even faster, and a voice in the back of my mind informed me that it was the overture from Wagner's _The Flying Dutchman_. The sound of some long dead orchestra filled the air as we struggled against the rapidly increasing gravity, the servos in our suits straining against the increased load they were asked to bear. I quickly abandoned the empty Paint Gun and pulled myself towards the nearest ladder that would lead up into the central shaft and zero gravity. I struggled with every step, part of me wanting to just give is, but fear lent me the strength to continue.

Santos reached the ladder first, but rather than climbing, turned to cover me with the Buccaneer, firing at something behind me. He was starting to panic, and at least two of the gel batons came close to hitting me. Fortunately, I managed to reach the ladder before his aim got any worse, and started to pull myself up against the by then 2g's. Reaching the next deck, I turned to help Santos up, only to see something grab him by the shoulder and start to drag him away. Grabbing the ladder with my left hand, I reached down with my right and just managed to get a grip on the eye-bolt on the top of his backpack. My helmets HUD flashed red as I pulled with all my might, the servos in my suit starting to fail one by one as I tried to lift 400-kilograms of man and suit against two gravities, not to mention whatever the hell it was that was trying to drag him away. He reached up and grabbed my arm, pulling himself up as he kicked furiously at something, I still don't want to know what.

Well, someone up there was looking out for him, as whatever it was that was trying to grab Santos lost its grip, and I was able to pull him up through the hatch and pull the emergency lever, sealing the hatch tighter than a nuns arse. Something started to bang against it, but Santos and I were already making our way up the ladder towards the central shaft. The higher we claimed, the less the centrifugal gravity clawed at us, until we finally emerged into zero gravity. Unfortunately, it was at that point that the lights started to go off; in the distance at first, but growing ever closer, as if the darkness itself was stalking us. The airlock we'd used to board was back towards the bow, now hidden in the darkness, but a flash of inspiration reminded me that there was an emergency deck just behind the main grav-deck, and there'd be escape pods there. Not perfect, but preferable to trying to make our way through a blacked-out warship with who knows what hunting us. I grabbed Santos by the arm and pointed to the markings on the shaft that showed the universal sign for escape pods in fluorescent paint, and he instantly understood what I had in mind. I tried to raise the _Lorelei_ over my suits radio, but it was being jammed by the same opera music as was still blasting out of the ships PA-system.

I couldn't even speak to Santos, who was standing right beside me, it was so loud.

We managed to reach the junction that led off towards the emergency deck just as the light behind us snapped off, and for an instant I saw _something_ in a SLDF uniform floating towards us, but I didn't stick around long enough to find out what. Finding extra reserves of strength from somewhere, I pulled myself towards the welcoming embrace of the escape pods. Out of pure necessity, escape pods and lifeboats aren't tied into a ships main systems; you need to know that they can be deployed even if the rest of the ship has lost all power and is little more than a floating hunk of scrap metal. Which is especially helpful when you find yourself on the run from a crazed AI intent on adding you to its 'crew'. I forced myself to stop for a moment and examine the controls; each pod and lifeboat could be launched individually, either from inside or by a central control unit on the bulkhead. The image of what even a single Kreuss XX Heavy Naval PPC would do to one of the fragile pods, let along a full broadside. I gestured Santos towards the nearest hatch, set a ten second delay, slammed my hand down on the big red button marked 'launch all' and dived in after him.

The hatch snapped shut behind me with maybe a millimetre to spare, and I was instantly pressed against it as the emergency rockets fired, propelling the escape pod out of the _Charlotte's_ hull and into the dark embrace of the void. Through the small porthole at the bow, I could see _Lorelei_ , her thrusters firing sporadically as her docking arms waved about, her docking arms reaching out to grab what looked worryingly like her own escape pods. The airlock to her small craft bay was wedged half open, the crushed remains of one of the shuttles blocking the others from leaving. I considered yelling at Santos to deactivate our automated emergency beacon, then decided that being the one escape pod without a working beacon might make us stand out more. Instead we could do little more than hold on as the small drive unit kicked in, rocketing us away from the _Charlotte_ on a course that quickly took us into the shadow of the rock the battleship was hiding behind.

Neither Santos or I spoke for what felt like days, but had to have been an hour at most. Fear, I guess, that making even the slightest noise would somehow give us away. Instead we just sat there, him in one of the seats, me sprawls against the rear bulkhead until the drive cut-out and we went ballistic. There was little we could do then but sit and wait to see what happened next, but at least I was free to move to one of the seats; least then I'd be a little more comfortable if the end came. The simple and thankfully very basic computer built into the escape pod chirped, warning of a massive IR flair, and at first I was convinced that the _Charlotte_ was indeed firing on us, but then it registered a hyperspace jump signal consistent with a ship the size of a _McKenna_ , and that was, thank the Good Lord, the last we ever saw of the _Charlotte Cameron_.

Escape pods, even Star League vintage ones, aren't exactly built with long duration space-flight in mind, but it was all that stood between us and the uncaring vacuum of space. A little basic maths, assisted by the almost painfully dumb navigational system, allowed us to lay in a course for the Zenith jump-point and fire what remained of the main drive to get us headed towards the general vicinity of the rendezvous point where the JumpShip that had brought us to that God forsaken system was due to come pick us up in a weeks time. Our only hope for rescue was in them arriving on time, picking up our distress beacon and deciding to investigate. Escape pods are, be design, small, cramped boxes with just enough life support to keep six people alive for two weeks. With just the two of that, we had, on paper, more than enough to keep us going until help arrived. But the pod was three centuries old, and the only maintenance it would have had in that time were under the direction of a homicidally made AI willing to execute its own crew for what it saw as disloyalty towards the Star League.

Well, the fact that I'm telling you this story should make it clear that we survived; it was a hellish two weeks while we wait first for the JumpShip to arrive, then for the shuttle they sent out to reach us. I don't know what we were expecting, but to be met by a full Knight of the Republic and two aids, who spent the week it took the shuttle to return to the jump-point debriefing us on everything that had happened after we found the _Charlotte_ , including going over the data and footage captured by our suits. They didn't seemed surprised that we found her, which is why I still believe that it was the Republic that hired Murphy to investigate the system, but they did seem genuinely shocked by what we had found. Well, the Knight and one of the aids did; the other, a hawk-nosed man who went only by Mr Clearwater, seemed less shocked and more intrigued, and I feel sure that he knew more than he was letting on. They made us sign non-disclosure agreements, warning that everything that had happened since we'd arrived in the system was a matter of national security that could endanger the entire Republic if it got out...well, you can guess what I thought of that. Once we were back on the JumpShip, they kept us under close watch, making sure that we didn't talk to any of the passengers or crew while the jump-dive to finish recharging then got the hell out of there.

Forty people shipped out on the _Lorelei_ , but only Santos and I came back.

This was the first system we jumped to, and I took passage on the first ship headed in-system, eager to put a gravity well between myself and the _Charlotte Cameron_. I've been dirt-side ever since, and I'll die before I go anywhere near outer space again, not while _she's_ out there.

 **The End**


	5. Lucky No7

**Lucky No.7**

MechWarriors are, by nature, fairly superstitious.

Many have their own little routines that they go through during start up. Or they have a lucky charm that they always hand from the corner of their main viewscreen. Or they've had the same cooling vest since basic training that they refuse to get rid of because it brings them luck. But they can be equally superstitious when it comes to things they consider bad-luck, such as a particular type of BattleMech, or having an odd number of rounds loaded into their autocannon.

Or a 'Mech that's killed almost a dozen pilots.

Enter the THG-10E _Thug_ Assault Mech with the call-sigh _Shamrock-7_ , due to the only identification markings it had being a four-leaf clover and the number seven. Or as she's better known among the Draconis March Militia, _Unlucky No.7_. No one seemed quite sure exactly how _Shamrock-7_ had ended up on Raman, the most widely accepted theory being she it had been left behind by the Snakes when they pulled out in 2818, probably in the hope of killing a few extra Davion pilots.

Oh, yeah; _Shamrock-7_ is a killer.

Far back as records go, every pilot assigned to _Shamrock-7_ has died, and in pretty much every conceivable way; faulty environmental controls suffocating the pilot before the Techs could break open the cockpit after the release catches stuck, electrocuted by by malfunctioning neurohelmet that passed every safety test before and after the accident, poisoning by coolant vapours seeping into the cockpit, and my personal favourite; ejector-seat rockets firing with cockpit escape hatch securely closed.

They needed to hose the cockpit out after that one.

Long story short, by the time 3039 rolled around, no one wanted to go anywhere near _Shamrock-7_ , let alone pilot her. They wouldn't even scrap her for parts, because when they tried, pilots refused to go near their 'Mech's out of fear that the curse had been carried over. So she was placed in storage in an otherwise unused bunker at the back of an isolate fire-base out in the sticks where nobody senior enough to kick up a fuss had to worry about her. But she was still officially listed on our TO&E, so some poor sod had to run basic maintenance on her, and that job fell to me; Assistant-Technician 3rd class and professional screw-up, Cassidy Sinéad Murphy. I think that the Quartermaster found it funny, giving a woman with the most Irish sounding name in history, yet looked like she'd stepped right out of a DCMS recruitment poster, the job of looking after an old Drac 'Mech with a name like _Shamrock-7_.

So I was tasked with keeping her in perfect running condition, which is kind of hard to do when you're so far down the pecking order when it comes to parts and equipment that it's often easier to 'borrow' what you need than it is to wait for your requisitions to go through. And as no one in their right mind want to be in the same building as _Shamrock-7_ , I had to do pretty much everything myself, so I spent more than the usual amount of time around the harbinger of death. And in situations like that, well, boredom sets in after a few hours tinkering with a fire-control system you know is never going to be used, and like a lot of Tech's, especially AsTech's, I started out wanting to be a MechWarrior, until I flunked out of training for punching a superior asshole.

Not my fault he had a very punchable face and the personality to match.

So yeah, I started running a few extra tests, making sure that, should hell actually freeze over, _Shamrock-7_ was ready to rock-and-roll. I took a strange kind of pride in getting her combat ready, even if I knew for a fact that nobody was readying to paperwork I submitted. I also started spending some of my off-duty time around the simulators, grabbing as much time as I could. The system was old, prone to flake out on you and the command couch smelt of old feet, but after a year, I managed to get myself simulator-rated on a _Thug_.

I know, I know; there's a whole world of difference between a simulator and the real thing, but it wasn't like they were going to let me pilot an actual BattleMech, especially given that _Shamrock-7_ was the only _Thug_ on the entire planet. But I was able to get my file updated to include the fact that I was technically rated to at least move _Shamrock-7_ around the fire-base if asked. Not that I ever actually expected to do anything like that. Hell, the only time I'd ever brought her up to full power was by remote while I hid outside with the big, thick blast door closed.

But, you know, the universe had other ideas.

You're unlikely to find Raman in any books about the War of '39; we were never officially invaded, more of a raid in force to keep our Militia from redeploying elsewhere. But even a combined arms battalion of second-rate DCMS troops were more than enough to rip our main force a new one when they managed to catch them with their pants down. Caught us all with our pants down, truth be told. Even our quiet little half-forgotten fire-base got strafed by a couple of aerospace fighters that took out the radio hut and the CO before anyone realised what was going on. Two more runs took out what minimal fixed defences we had and the main generator, leaving us with nothing but what we could squeeze out of the backup and the local civilian grid. The XO managed to get his head on straight and organise what was left of our forces into a defensive line anchored on his battered old _Rifleman_ , managing to scare off the fighters by filling the air with bulk of his autocannon ammo.

Then word came down over the general channel that we'd kicked the hornets nest, and a full lance of BattleMechs with armour support had been seen headed our way. It's kind of amazing just how quickly news like that focuses the mind. We'd all grown up on stories, handed down generation to generation, about what life had been like under Combine rule, and none of us were keen to experience it for themselves. Especially not a pretty young AsTech who'd probably remind them a little too much of the girl they left behind. No, I was fully in the ' _save the last bullet for yourself_ ' camp, but I also knew something that the Snakes didn't; that _Shamrock-7_ was ready to go, presuming someone had the guts to climb into the cockpit.

Well, better to go down swinging, right?

There's an old adage among Tech's that, in confusion, there is profit, and there's plenty of confusion in a fire-base that's expecting to be attacked by a superior force in the near future. As such nobody paid much attention to another helping hand collecting a couple of crates of SRM's from the ammo dump and vanish into the gathering dark. I held my breath while starting up the ammo loader, each click and bump taking at least a year off of my life. And all the while I was waiting to hear the sound of weapons fire from outside. Yes, the bunker had nice, thick walls. And yes, it was pretty obvious from the outside that it was the equivalent of a junk drawer, even with the ' _abandon all hope, all ye who enter here_ ' graffiti on the doors. But that was no guarantee that the raiders weren't going to huff and puff and blow my house down.

I'd finally finished loading the SRM's and topping up the coolant when the alarms started to sound, followed by the muffled _whoosh_ of LRM fire. What was more worrying was the screech of the return fire, which sounded a lot louder and seem to be directed right at me. I know it wasn't, but that's how it felt at the time. The entire bunker shook, dust and I don't want to think what else raining down from the ceiling as I stripped off my coveralls and squeezed into the old, often repaired cooling vest I'd managed to snag and grabbed the neurohelmet that hadn't been used in decades. Climbing the ladder to the cockpit, I could help but feel the entire building shake as I herd the _crump-crump-crump_ of exploding munitions just outside the door. The _Thug_ lurched suddenly, straining against the maintenance restraints, and I felt sure that _Shamrock-7_ was about to claim another victim. But it rocked back, the violence of the movement almost sending me crashing to the ground.

Cursing under my breath, I scurried up the last few meters of the ladder until I reached the cockpit and hit the quick release. It opened with a hiss, indicating that the over-pressure system was operating, and I quickly clambered inside. Just in time, as it happened, as something exploded outside with enough force to shake the very foundations of the bunker, and the hatch snapped shut right behind me; half a second slower, and I would have lost a foot to _Unlucky No.7_. Falling head-first into the command couch, I cursed like a spacer on ground-side as I re-arranged myself and then started to connect my cooling vest and neurohelmet. Sure, I'd spent time in a simulator, and the basics are the same, but nothing quite replicates the feel of an actual BattleMech coming to life below you; it's something you feel through the seat of your pants, a deep rumble, throbbing that envelops you.

" **SYSTEMS ONLINE.** " the 'Mech's synthesised electronic voice echoed through the cockpit, " **COMMAND CODE AUTHENTICATION REQUIRED.** "

"Authorization code ' _shut up and do what I tell you!_ '." I snapped back, glad for once that they'd let me pick my own command authorization code.

" **COMMAND CODE ACCEPTED.** " The computer responded, the various screens and instrument panels flicking to life around me, " **ALL SYSTEMS NOW AT YOUR DISPOSAL.** "

I snapped the eight point safety hardness into place and took a firm grip on the twin controls sticks, the _Thug_ jerking upright as my own sense of balance, transmitted by the thousands of sensors built into the neurohelmet and the numerous pads attached to my body took over. A lot of people have this crazy idea that a MechWarrior becomes one with their machine, but I've always found it to be more like wearing a really big coat...that just happens to be covered in armour and weapons.

The flip of a switch disconnected all the umbilical that connected _Shamrock-7_ to the maintenance bay, and a second started the ancient, worn bunker doors opening. They shuddered, the screech of metal scraping against metal reaching me in the cockpit even over the sounds of battle outside. They ground to a halt less than a quarter of the way open, the ancient electric motor dying with a cloud of smoke and a shower of sparks. I unleashed a string of curses that would have one my ancestors proud; there was no way that something as big and bulky as a _Thug_ was getting through that doorway, and that meant that I'd have to get...creative.

A quick look at the range-finder told me that the doors were inside the minimum range of the twin PPC's, and I didn't feel like disabling the safeties if I could possible avoid it. SRM's have no minimum range, but I wasn't about to risk setting off an explosion in a confined space that could be housing who knows what, which left the 'Mech's two massive 'hands' as my only real option. Taking a tentative step forward, I felt _Shamrock-7_ move under me, and let me tell you, that's another thing that the simulators never get right. Eighty tons of metal and myomer lurched forwards like a drunk as I struggled to regain control. The 'Mech fell forward, its left shoulder hitting the door with a crash that must have been heard half way around the world. The door itself held for about half a second, then there was an ear piercing screech as the ancient bolts started to give way, threatening to send _Shamrock-7_ , and yours truly, sprawling onto the parade ground outside.

I think Chapter One of the MechWarriors handbook starts "never find your face-first on an active battleground."

Gripping the controls for all they were worth, I managed to steady the _Thug_ , getting its feet back under me even as the door gave way and crashed to the ground. Days later, the clean-up crews would find I took out a squad of Snake infantry, but I apparently can't claim them on my kill-card, as it was classed as an ' _Act of God_ ' as opposed to an intentional act on my part. It had the unfortunate side effect of announcing my presence on the field of battle, drawing the attention of a pair of _Panthers_ that had been playing whack-a-mole with our own infantry, and they responded by firing blind into the bunker. Still slightly unsteady on my feet, I almost landed on my arse as two PPC bolts and half a dozen SRM's hit _Shamrock-7's_ chest just below the low-slung cockpit. Armour flaked off in dinner plate sized pieces, and the heat levels in the cockpit spiked, but none of the alarms sounded, indicating that the _Thug_ had taken the hit without suffering any lasting, and more importantly, critical, damage.

The outline of one of the _Panthers_ appeared in my HUD, and I instinctively dropped the cross-hairs over it. The targeting radical pulsed yellow for a moment, then turned green, indicating a good lock even as the far lighter Mech started to back up. I don't remember pulling the triggers, but _Shamrock-7_ spat forth man-made lightning from its arms, the glare nothing short of blinding in the confines of the old bunker. One missed wide, but the second connected with the _Panther's_ left arm, neatly severing it at the elbow, the sudden loss of the lower limb making the smaller Mech stagger, dropping it right back into my cross-hairs.

The tone of a missile lock sang in my ear, and eight SRM's leapt forth from my Mech's shoulders without my fingers moving a milometer.

Explosions peppered the _Panther_ from waist to head, obviously catching the pilot by surprise as the scout fell backwards, crashing into the next bunker down. The wall cracked but held, the second _Panther_ moving to cover their lance-mate as it struggled to right itself, huge rents in their armour testament to the damage _Shamrock-7_ had done. The capacitor lights flashed green, indicating that both of my PPC's had re-charged, and I quickly shifted the targeting radical to the new target. And again the weapons fired without any input from my part even as _Shamrock-7_ started to lurch forward again, stepping out of the bunker into the chaos outside.

The second _Panther_ was far less fortunate than the first; both PPC bolts converged on its head, which simply ceased to exist as the twin lances of man-made lightning washed over it like the wrath of the Good Lord Himself. The Snake 'Mech stood stock still for a moment, smoke and sparks emanating from the glowing stump that had been its neck, then it fell like a puppet with the strings cut, landing in a undignified heap on the ground. Seeing their friend killed before them, the first _Panther_ raised their right arm, bringing their own PPC in line with my cockpit.

I froze. I'm not shamed to admit that; I froze up like the half-trained idiot that I was, just waiting for the world to turn white before I found myself before St Peter and the Pearly Gates.

 _Shamrock-7_ , however, didn't freeze.

Stepping forward, the _Thug_ swung its huge left arm round, knocking the _Panther's_ arm out of the way even as it fire, the PPC discharging harmlessly into the night sky. Then the _Thug's_ right arm came round, the battle fist clenched as it smashed into the far lighter machines head one, twice, three times. Mettle smashed into metal, the hideous sound of armour and structural members giving way until the cockpit gave way and the _Thug's_ hand came back.

To this day, I choose to believe that the red stains I saw covering _Shamrock-7's_ fist were hydraulic fluid.

It's safe to say that the Drac's weren't expecting the face an Assault 'Mech at out little fire base, and my sudden appearance on the battlefield, along with the speed and savagery with which _Shamrock-7_ had eliminated half of their BattleMech support had their armour and infantry in disarray.

" **TARGETS ELIMINATED, CASSIDY MURPHY.** " the voice of _Shamrock-7's_ computer announced with what could only be described as a smug tone, " **PLEASE DESIGNATE NEXT TARGET.** "

I froze again, but this time for a far different reason.

Anyone who's spent much time around advanced equipment, especially anything dating back to the Star League, knows how people just _love_ to add voice synthesizers to everything. Often it's little more than an advanced operating system programmed to react to pre-set voice commands, much like the voice-print authentication used for BattleMech security. But this...this felt like something far more advanced.

" **I AWAIT ORDERS,** **CASSIDY MURPHY.** " _Shamrock-7_ sounded almost impatient.

"The Dracs!" I found myself shouting, "Target any DCMS units!"

" **ORDERS RECEIVED AND UNDERSTOOD.** " I flinched as the computer all but chuckled, " **ENGAGING THE...DRACS.** "

I don't care what anyone says; I had little to nothing to do with what followed. _Shamrock-7_ stalked the Fire Base, unleashing death and destruction upon the raiders, whicle I could do little but watch from the confines of the cockpit. I've been told that the _Thug_ moved like a veteran MechWarrior was at the controls, but after a while my hands fell from the joysticks, the 'Mech more than happy to fght on its own. I tried to remember everything I could about the 'Mech's computer and the pilot interface system; nothing had seemed at all out of the ordinary, with even the operating system being SLDF issue.

Then it hit me; the _Thug_ was a Terran Hegemony design, and they'd put a lot of time and money into AI research, the M-5 ' _Caspar_ ' drone WarShips being perhaps the most infamous example. But there had always been stories about plans to build entire armies of drone BattleMech's that could fight without human intervention. And given how nobody seemed to know just where _Shamrock-7_ had come from... I didn't want to finish that thought.

I was brought rudely back to reality as a flight of LRM's slammed into _Shamrock-7's_ left arm, shattering armour plates that were then pulverised by a burst of autocannon fire. The _Thug_ stopped and turned to face it's attacker; a _Dragon_ heavy BattleMech and most likely the Snake commander. I felt my ride crouch low even as the weapons locked on, and I braced myself for what was to follow.

A wave of heat struck my with near physical force as _Shamrock-7_ unleashed a full Alpha-Strike against the _Dragon_ , filling the air with smoke and lightning. Everything hit the _Dragon_ ; the PPC's gouging huge rents in its centre and left torso while the SRM's peppered it's right arm and left leg. The lighter 'Mech staggered under the onslaught, but its pilot maintained control, keeping it on its feet and unleashing another blast of autocannon fire that stitched a series of impact craters from my left hip to right shoulder, only narrowly missing the cockpit. This was followed by an emerald lance from its left arm mounted medium laser that did little more than scorch the paint on _Shamrock-7's_ left forearm.

" **AT LAST, A TRUE WARRIOR.** " the Mech's computer hissed excitedly, " **I WILL ENJOY THIS.** "

Stepping to the right, _Shamrock-7_ unleashed another flight of SRM's, the PPC's still charging, forcing the _Dragon_ to pause to take the hit before turning to track with its most powerful weapons. A second volley of LRM's missed wide, but the Combine pilot walked their autocannon fire into my left hip, stripping away most of the protection there. _Shamrock-7_ replied with a one-two barrage from its PPC's, stripping away the armour protecting the other 'Mech's left shoulder and eating into the internals. Myomer strands melted and snapped, the arm hanging lip at the _Dragon's_ side as its artificial muscles were severed, only the internal structure keeping it attached. _Shamrock-7_ kept moving to the right, forcing the _Dragon_ to keep turning in order to bring its remaining weapons to bear on the larger 'Mech.

I hadn't had time to fully load the missile bins, and _Shamrock-7_ fired the last of them into the _Dragon_ , finally ripping its battered left arm free, followed by yet another one-two pucnh from the PPC's. The cockpit was an inferno by that point, but I could just about make out the first glow from within the chest of the _Dragon_ that indicated that the remaining LRM ammo had started to cook-off. They exploded like the devils own firecrackers, flames billowing out of the open missile ports and through rents blasted in the armour. The heavy 'Mech almost seemed to dance as the fire reached the ammo bin for the autocannon and it likewise detonated, sending the right arm spiralling off into the night. At least one of the explosions must have damaged the shielding for the reactor, as the _Dragon_ suddenly went into emergency shut-down, the pilot hitting the chicken-switch and blasting off into the night sky, riding a pillar of smoke and flame that served as his rides funeral pyre.

" **YESSSS!** " Shamrock-7 growled, " **VICTORY IS MINE!** " the Mech seemed to shudder, and I suddenly found the controls responding again, " **I THANK YOU,** **CASSIDY MURPHY: I ENJOYED THIS.** "

"You're...you're welcome?" I stuttered, relived to once again be the master of my own destiny even as I listened to the shouts of triumph announcing the retreat of the remaining Combine forces from the Fire Base. I quickly started the shut-down sequence, locking _Shamrock-7_ in place as I struggled to come up with a way of explaining what had happened.

I went with the truth, what with it being the easiest to remember, but no one seemed willing to believe me. Instead I found myself transferred to the capital, promoted to full MechWarrior, permanently assigned to _Shamrock-7_ , as I was apparently the only one willing to pilot it. And it's kept quiet ever since that night, acting like a good little BattleMech and not hurting anyone. But every time I have to strap myself in, I can't help but feel that it's just waiting to be set free again the next time someone attacks Raman.

 **The End?**


	6. Free Fire

_This instalment is based upon an incident that reportedly happened in Afghanistan around ten years ago_

 **Free Fire**

Sometimes, when you're out in the field, you see things that, well, the Brass doesn't like you talking about.

I'm not talking about stumbling onto some experimental prototype or covert operation, but rather something they don't want to admit happened because there's nothing in the regulations to explain it. Times like that, you're encouraging to get creative with your after-action reports, find something that fits the events but is a bit more palatable to HighCom. Not that every soldier has experienced something odd, just that you hear stories.

Stories like this one.

My battalion had been shifted to the Periphery boarder to work back up to fighting strength after the end of the Fourth Succession War. We'd given as good as we got against the Combine, but needed time to integrate the replacements into our existing unit structure before we were ready to go back on the line. So they had us out there on the edge of the Greater Darkness, passing on our experience to the local militia units. Now I know that a lot of regulars like to rag on 'weekend warriors', but those men and women are ready to fight to protect their homes the same as the rest of us, so I tend to be willing to cut them a little slack if they're not exactly up to Nagelring standards.

This one operation came up on, well, I don't want to say anything that might help identify anyone else who was there, so let's just say 'a planet on the Periphery boarder, far enough away from the League that we didn't have to worry about them paying us a surprise visit' and leave it at that. Bandits were using a series of deep valley's in a mountain range to strike out at isolated communities, grabbing food, parts and anything else they thought they could sell on the black market. We didn't have anywhere near enough troops to garrison every town, village and hamlet in the area without stripping the rest of the planet clean, and the bandits seemed well enough connected to know which towns were more trouble than they were worth.

So instead the Kommandant comes up with what was actually a pretty decent idea: a lance of Regulars and two of local Militia were to go out into the valley's orbital recon had indicated the bandits used to move from their hidden camps deep in the mountains and catch them before they reached open country. We were given rather open ended orders, allowing us to deploy as we saw fit, so I split my lance into two sections: I took one of the veteran enlisted pilots with me and six of the militia pilots, while my Sergeant and the FNG took the remaining two locals to act as our fire-support. They had the Sergeants _Orion_ , the Rookies _Crusader_ and a pair of militia _Dervishs_ , meaning that they could put down a decent missile barrage to cover us if needed. That unfortunately left my two detachment with just my _Rifleman_ , a _Shadow Hawk_ and a _Griffin_ for a big punch, the rest of the unit consisting of nothing bigger than a _Valkyrie_ , being mostly _Stingers_ and _Wasps_. We had a single _Locust_ , which I deployed half a click ahead of us, covered in all the camouflage netting we could scrape together, its pot had orders to keep her head down and not fire unless fired upon first.

We pulled off a couple of successful ambushs like this, only taking light damage from a few bandit 'Mechs that looked like they'd been pulled from the local junk yard when we were told to move to a different valley, as the bandits were getting wise.

And that's when it all started to come undone.

Couple of the local pilots came to me, unofficially, and said it was a bad idea to move to that particular valley: it had a bad reputation amongst the local population, who avoided it unless absolutely necessary. People had gone missing there, never to be seen again, and sometimes even the search parties got lost and needed rescue. There were also reports of equipment malfunctioning, giving conflicting readings or just shutting down and refusing to work full-stop. All in all, the locals considered it a bad place, somewhere best avoided. Some even went as far as to say it was cursed, that evil spirits roamed there.

Now I'm not one to take such talk at face value, but there was something about the way the two of them sounded, the look of genuine fear in their eyes, that made me do a little digging.

At first the locals didn't want to talk, claiming it was all just campfire stories, but they all seemed on edge, so I kept asking. Eventually a local sherif invited me for a drink one night and told me that a lot of the stories were true, and that nobody was willing to venture into the valley, especially at night, if they could possibly avoid it. And again, I wasn't going to accept talk of evil spirits, but you sometimes encounter areas where the local weather or geology can conspire to mess with your equipment. And even with new parts, there was the possibility that even our front-line BattleMechs might be susceptible to whatever was causing trouble in the valley.

So I contacted the Kommandant and requested that we move the option to somewhere else, siting reports of equipment malfunction in the valley. But he shot down the idea, so in we went.

The militia were a little skittish, but sitting in the command couch of a BattleMech tends to steady the nerves somewhat. And following the standard plan, the _Locust_ found a hiding place further down the valley while my unit dug in behind a low ridge line, the fire-support lance setting up on a flat area up one side of the valley. Everyone was in position, their 'Mech's hunkered down and on standby to minimise the chance of the bandits spotting us before it was too late. Which meant that we were reliant on passive sensors, which can be twitchy at the best of times, and soon started to give conflicting reports, so we shut them down and switched to night-vision only.

There's not really much to do when you're just waiting for someone who may or may not appear out in the middle of nowhere, especially in the middle of the night. You can't sleep, because you need to be ready to go in an instant, and you can't read a book or listen to music in case you miss something. All you can do is keep checking your 'Mechs systems while keeping one eye on the HUD. There's a lot of truth to the old saying that life in the army is 99% boredom and 1% abject terror, and it can start to play tricks on you after a moment.

Unsurprisingly, it was my fellow regular who first sounded the alarm over the hardwire connecting our 'Mech's, and I set my main screen to cycle through the various passive sensors. Magscan found nothing, nore did seismic or neutrino, but night-vision clearly showed eight objects moving up the far end of the valley in single file. They were too far out to make out any details, but they were certainly big enough to be BattleMechs.

I switched to the channel linking me to the pilot out in the _Locust_ , asking if she'd been able to make out any details, maybe let us know what we were facing. But she insisted that she couldn't see anything, and I didn't want her to risk giving her position away by moving. So instead I powered up my _Rifleman_ and went active with her Garret D2j, still one of the best sensor suites ever produced. It meant taking a risk, because there's just no way to hide that much EM output going down-range, but the 'bandits' didn't seem to notice at all. Which meant that they were either asleep at the controls, or unconcerned that someone was trying to get a targeting lock on them.

But nothing appeared on my screen.

I contacted my Sergeant, and he confirmed that they had the unknowns on visual but nothing else. This was starting to concern me, because you hear all kinds of stories about people digging up caches of lost Star League tech, so there's always the risk of coming up against someone with some unexpected edge. But that would have required that every single one of them had lost-tech ECM, and that kind of find would be worth more than they could possibly hope to get by raiding farm towns.

I was still trying to work out what was going on when the emerald flash of a medium laser slashed through the night from somewhere on my left: one of the militia pilots had panicked and fired by accident.

With the elements of surprising lost, I ordered weapons free, dropping my crosshairs over the leading target and opening up with both autocannons. Soon everyone was letting rip with everything they had, lighting up the night with a barrage of lasers, missiles and autocannons. The _Griffin_ to my right fired its PPC, spending a bolt of man-made lightning down range as the support lance unleashed more than eighty missiles at once. The air was filled with the crack and fizz of weapons fire, everyone doing their best to hit the flickering forms on their screens. I could see tracers bouncing off rocks that were then pulverised by missiles or PPC blasts, trees and bushes exploding or bursting into flames as lasers speared them. It was hell, pure and simple, but not so much as a mouse-fart came back the other way.

After what felt like an hour, but my mission clock said was only a couple of minutes, I gave the order to advance towards the 'enemy', and my double lance began leapfrogging forward in pairs, one 'Mech covering the other in turn. The support lance followed suit, working their way along the side of the valley, laying down a sporadic barrage of missiles and laser fire. We reached the point where the _Locust_ had been hidden, and it added its limited firepower to our own.

Still nothing in return, even as the flickering images on the night-vision started to move away.

Then I realised something: our weapons fire seemed to be passing through them without meeting even the slightest resistance. And they weren't walking, but rather floating maybe half a meter above the ground. I cycled through all my active and passive sensors again, even resorting to using the standard issue MK.1 eyeballs the Good Lord saw fit to issue me with, but only the night-vision showed anything. I gave the order to hold fire, and the night grew strangely quite, with only the popping of hot metal and the faint roar of the countless fires we had started. Certainly not what should have been the rumbling of almost a company of BattleMechs moving off at the quick-march.

I called for a quick roll-call, and once everyone reported in, I asked if anyone had taken any hits. The radio was deathly quite, everyone waiting for someone else to speak up.

"Leutnant," my Sergeant asked somewhat hesitately, "what the hell did we just shoot at?"

That was the same question the Kommandant asked when we reported in a little after dawn, having not once found a single trace of the 'bandits' we had opened up on. I did my best to put into wards everything I'd seen, but he just looked at me like I'd grown a second head or something. Even after the others backed up my story and the techs had gone over our battleroms, there just wasn't anything concrete to put in our report.

The Kommandant ended up calling the entire incident a 'nighttime live-fire exercise', praising the militia for how well they had executed the battle plan. Then he ordered us to set up an ambush in a different valley almost a hundred kilometers away, and told us never to mention what we had seen in any official reports or documents.

It's been almost ten years now, and I still don't know what we saw that night... and I'm not sure I really want to. But it certainly wasn't some group of bandits with lost-tech ECM gear, that's for sure.

 **The End**


	7. The Kraken Wakes

**The Kraken Wakes**

I'm a structural engineer by trade, not a writer, so I hope you can forgive me if the account that follows is somewhat rough around the edges.

As in said, I'm a structural engineer, specialising in habits designed to survive in, shall we say, 'adverse environments'? Which is shorthand for anywhere a human can't survive unassisted, for one reason or another. And it's an interesting job, or at least I've always thought so: there's no end to the challenges that can face a project when someone sets their mind upon setting up shop somewhere humans were never supposed to go. And while the Star League may have had the wherewithal to terraform most places considered worth living, there are still a few that would have been beyond even their almost magical abilities.

Case in point was LV-416, or Typhonus, as it had been so dramatically named. And I can't say I blame whoever did name it: it is an evil looking world, an ice giant such a dark shade of black that looking at it felt like looking into a singularity. There were occasional streaks of crimson red, indicating storms so massive that they could have swollowed most habitable worlds whole. Arcs of lightning, long enough to cross continents and with powerful enough to vaporise cities in an instant play across the upper cloud bands. It has three near Terran sized moons, Orthrus, Cerberus and Hydra, but is was so deep within their primaries radiation belt that they're little more than lumps of radioactive rock, constantly erupting and melting due to gravitational stress on their cores.

Typhonus is as close to hell as you're likely to find in this galaxy and still be counted among the living.

What is it with survay crews anyway? Did every single one of them take a class in ancient mythology or something? Lord knows how many explored systems in the Inner Sphere, let alone beyond, and every single one of them seems to have at least one world, moon of rock named after some god or demon orbiting it.

Wait... where was I?

Oh, Typhonus, right.

So, thing is, despite the way it may look to the naked eye, a big-arse planet like that has all kinds of interesting things going on: chemical reactions under extreme heat and pressure can result in all sorts of useful end products. I remember one planet, somewhere out near the Draconis Rift, where they used to send down specially built shuttles to scoop up crystals from the upper atmosphere that could be used in weapons grade lasers. Lot of money in something like that, and the Star League was more than willing to speculate to accumulate, and that was what brought us to Typhonus in the first place.

You see, under enough pressure, gas can start to act like a liquid, even to the point where an object of the right shape can, for want of a better word, float on it. And Typhonus has gas and pressure to spare, meaning that there was a layer not too far down where it was almost like a liquid...not like a sea or anything...it's kind of hard to explain without getting too technical. Let's just say that the Star League was advanced enough that they could build a gas-mining rig that could sit quite happily in the atmosphere of a world like Typhonus, and we'd been hired to see if there was anything worth salvaging. There was no way we could recover the entire rig: we had no idea how they'd gotten it into position in the first place, but there was an untold treasure in LostTech to be found inside, provided we could get to it safely. Which is why I was brought in to make sure that they didn't accidentally cut into something they shouldn't and send the entire things down into the depths, salvage crew and all.

Now a planet like Typhonus has its own jump-points, so we were able to get in at least a little closer, even if the JumpShip was too far out to actually help with the recovery operation. So we went in with three DropShips: an old _Mule_ called the _Sacagawea_ that acted as a sort of mother-ship for the other two, a pair of heavily modified _Condors_ named _Lewis_ and _Clark_. I was assigned to the _Lewis_ , along with the bulk of the support team, while the primary task of fixing the location of the rig and ensuring it was safe to land on with given to the _Clark_.

And you can't just dive into the atmosphere of something that big like normal: that's an easy way to get your ship and crew crushed. No, big planet like Typhonus, you need to take it nice and slow, just slide on gently down that gravity well all smooth like. I'm sure any pilot worth their damn could probably tell you just how hard it actually is, but I'm not a pilot, but I am the one telling this story.

So the _Clark_ goes in first, and softly-softly like, with the _Lewis_ sitting up in high orbit, trying to keep track of her through all the radiation and atmospheric interference. We knew the approximate location of the rig from the initial survey, but things as small as a city block tend to get tossed around in the atmosphere of an ice giant. So the crew of the _Clark_ had to take these wide, sweeping passes over the area, looking for any sign on the prize. Two days we sat up there, arses clenched tight enough to crack walnuts, watching her through the clouds as best we could, before they finally gave word that they'd picked up the rig on long-range scanners.

Unfortunately, she'd drifted into a the outermost edge of a storm, so they had to move quickly to try and pull her clear. And even with the massively oversized engines on the _Clark_ , that's no small task. They had me running all kinds of numbers, trying to work out the best places to set down so that the strain of her main engines didn't rip the rig in two. So you can bet I double, triple and quadruple checked my work, because I didn't want to be responsible for the mission going FUBAR before it had really started.

Well, thank the good lord that my maths was right, and the _Clark_ was able to move the rig away from the storm. With that little headache taken care of, the _Lewis_ came in on the far side of the rig, keeping it from becoming unbalanced. Given the size and mass of the rig, it's not like a few extra thousand tons of DropShip was going to do that, but why take the risk?

Now, you can't use a standard environment suit somewhere like Typhonus: between the heat, the pressure and the radiation, well, you might as well go out bare arse naked. No, you need top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art hostile environment gear, the sort of thing that costs more than a suit of battle armour. It's like walking around inside a miniature BattleMech, and about as agile, but it's not a time to worry about setting a fashion trend. No, you strap yourself into that big, ugly, bright orange son-of-a-bitch and prey they didn't skimp on the pre-mission maintenance.

Those suits, well, they're not the most comfortable thing to wear at the best of times, and struggling across the deck of a constantly moving gas-mining rig in the upper atmosphere of an ice giant isn't the best of times. The radios are effectively useless; nowhere near strong enough to punch through all the interference, so you're stuck on receive only. And that means that all you can hear is the clang of your feat on the deck, the hum of the life-support system and the rasping of your own breath. Even with the servos, you still have to really put your back into it, so you're drenched in sweat in no time. And you can't see shit in a soup-like atmosphere, so you're reliant on your HUD, which is crowded with all sorts of gages and readouts at the best of times. Best you can do is follow the yellow arrow that points you towards a beacon some poor sod had to go plant. And thankfully, that poor sod had been on the _Clark_.

I don't think I've ever been so happy to see a pressure-hull in my entire life.

Those environment suits only have so much life support, and it's almost impossible to do anything too precise in one, so the first job was to patch and repressurise at least part of the rig so we could get a better look at what we had to work with. Two of the crew had dragged a micro-fusion power cell across from one of the ships, and that was enough to power most of our equipment, so we quickly set about finding the rents and tears in the habitation block. Thankfully, the designers had built it to act as an emergency refuge in the event of an emergency, so it was even more heavily built than the other pressurised sections of the rig, and it wasn't long before we were able to get it sealed off. With that done, it was mainly a case of tracking down and patching micro-leaks and keeping an eye out for any signs of stress: nobody wanted to be outside of their suit if the Hull was to suddenly rupture. That was my job, and I double then triple checked everything before giving the order to repressurise.

The hull moaned and groaned like a dockside whore, but it held, a testament to the quality of the workmanship that went into building it in the first place.

With a breathable atmosphere, we could lose the environmental suits and work a lot quicker, even if it took us two whole days to make sure everything was decontaminated. We managed to set up a makeshift living area, so we could take our brakes without having to go all the way back to one of the DropShips, a couple of the crew even deciding to sleep there. I wasn't completely sold on the idea, but I did like concept of not having to make the treck back to the _Lewis_ just to grab some bunk-time. Everyone was still keenly aware just where we were and all that could go wrong, but after a while the human mind tends to adapt pretty well.

If only we'd know what was going to happen...

I was inspecting one of the lower levels, trying to restore at least partial power to the rest of the rig, when Parker, a crewmember assigned to work with me because you don't want to be alone when shit goes sideways, started freaking out, saying she'd seen something moving outside a nearby porthole. I assured her that is was probably just ice crystals playing with her mind, or at most, some part of the rig that had come loose in the long centuries since it had been abandoned and now dangling, but she didn't seem too convinced. So I made my way over to the porthole and pressed the visor of my environment suit up against it, craning my neck to try and get a better look, but I couldn't see anything but the swirling clouds.

Next day I was asked to go with Brett, the other structural engineer, to look at the what had been the landing control tower. Or rather, what was left of it. According to the schematics we'd found, it should have been a five story high tube with a bubble of 10cm thick transparent aluminium on the top, but it had broken off about half way, leaving a stump of twisted, jagged metal behind. Now I've seen damn near every kind of damage metal can suffer, from corrosion to battle damage to metal-eating bacteria, so I know metal that's been twisted and torn when I see it.

Few more days went by, most of which were spent replacing or repairing external lights. Which was odd, because most looked like they'd been deliberately smashed, while the main electrical board... we'll, somebody had taken a literal fire-axe to it, the broken-off head of which was still embedded within it. I was tasked with helping to repair it, even though it wasn't my field of expertise, so I was inside, away from the windows when the lights came back on, but apparently it was quite the sight to see.

Next week was pretty standard for a salvage operation: sorting out what's was worth saving and could be safely and easily removed. Computers, especially the processors, are always a good choice, given how small and light they are, and even broken or damaged ones tend to be worth a fair bit. After that it's any data storage devices, with even the smallest scrap of recoverable data often worth the cost of a DropShip. Places like N.A.I.S. just buy it all in bulk, no questions asked, so it's always at or near the top of any grab-list. Then you get, well, anything you can sell to LostTech collectors.

But that's when we discovered why the rig had been abandoned in the first place.

It started with the lights, out in the clouds. At first we thought it was just lightning, but the colours were wrong: too red/orange for lightning, even in an atmosphere like Typhonus. Then people started claiming to have seen something outside, just like Parker had. The boss accused them of drinking on the job, not something you wanted under the circumstances, but they were all sober as a judge on Sunday. Then Dallas, one of the crew chiefs, went missing while working outside. Brett and Ash, who'd been working with him, insisted that they only turned their backs for a moment, then there was a tug on the safety line, and when they looked back, he was gone.

We were all experienced salvage workers, hardly green to the dangers of the job: you don't last long in that line of work without gaining a somewhat fatalistic outlook on like, an acceptance that, when your number is up, it's up. We'd all had close calls, and known people who caught the bought the farm. But something about how Dallas was just gone set everyone on edge, and in a high-stress environment, that's not something you want happening. So Kane, the boss, decided to pull back to the _Sacagawea_ for some down-time and a rethink, give everyone a little time to decompress. So we started to pack up everything we'd already gathered together, stealing it up in containers that could protect it from the atmosphere as we carried it back to the DropShips.

That's why I was fortunate enough to be in my environment suit when it happened.

Metal can make some funny sounds when it's under stress: some are as benign as an old house creaking in the middle of the night, but an experienced ear knows to listen out for the telltale sounds of something about to go monumentally, catastrophically wrong. Unfortunately, I only just had the time to scream out a warning before the pressure hull ruptured, bulkhead crumpling like an empty beer-can. Had the rig been in perfect, or even serviceable condition, emergency hatches would have slammed shut, but we'd had to cut through most of them, so there wasn't really anything between the rupture point and the poor bastards who weren't in their environment suits. Which was, unfortunately, about half the work crew.

They died, and not quickly or painlessly. I won't go into details, but it wasn't good, and I still sometimes see their faces in my dreams, on the nights I wake in a cold sweat.

They were dead, but those of us still alive had to get back to the DropShips in one piece. Fortunately, within the habitation block, our radios could actually work, so the order was given to bug-out, and we started to make our way towards the now pointless airlock. Entire place was shaking and rattling like it was fit to come apart at the seems, so you can bet we hauled arse as fast as we could, even in an environment suit. There was this one bit, where there was a gantry over what had been a water tank at some point, and, well, let's just say that Ash and Kane didn't make it further than that. Everyone was starting to panic by that point, and with Kane gone, there wasn't a clear chain of command, and it all went to hell in a hand-basket, with people fighting to get through hatchways.

I felt something grab my arm, and I looked round to see Parker, gesturing as best she could towards a side-door. The two of us had become reasonably close, all things considered, and she seemed to be holding it together a little better than most of the others, so I decided to trust her. The corridor she led me down was narrow, almost too tight in places, but it allowed us to bypass some of the chock-points, and the fights to get through them. I never found out who got to the airlock first, or who they had to climb over to do so, but both the inner and outer hatches had been jammed open, allowing us to get outside quickly.

Parker was busy attaching a safety line between our suits, so I was the first to see it.

Bioluminescence is a crazy thing: it can make something from your worst nightmare seem like the most beautiful thing you can imagine. I don't know what it was, or if there was more than one, but it seemed almost as big as the rig and made of tentacles the size of a BattleMech and pulsating lights the same colour as the running lights on the rig. At least three of those tentacles had been wrapped around the habitation block, which had been been the most brightly illuminated part of the rig, and were busy tearing it apart. Others were gripping various parts of the rig, pushing and pulling at it.

There was a bright flash as the _Clark_ switched on all its external lights, including the massive floodlights built into its wings. They were no doubt hoping to guide survivors to safety, but it got the attention of whatever it was that was destroying thep rig. Parker went ridged with shock as a brightly flashing tentacle, so thick we could have stood on each others shoulders and still not been ble to see over the top, snaked passed us so close it felt like we could have reached out and touched it. It was pulsing bright, vibrant colours, and it whipped round like a rattlesnake, almost flipping the _Clark_ before enveloping the DropShip. The pilot must have panicked, because even through the soup of an atmosphere, I could see the main engine flair, but the creature had it, and started to squeeze.

I looked away, almost dragging Parker behind me: I didn't need to see what was going to happen. I'd seen enough death that day.

The _Lewis_ had been landed a hundred metres away from the habitation block, but under the circumstances, it felt like a hundred kilometres. Every step I took, I could feel the deck bucking and twisting beneath my feet. I stumbled more than once, but thankfully Parker was always there to help. Every step, I expected to be squashed like an ant by one of those tentacles as they swayed around about us, filling the sky with strange, otherworldly patterns of light and shadow. We had no idea of knowing if the _Lewis_ was still there, or if it had taken off, or suffered the same fate s the _Clark_. But we had no other choice but to keep going.

Eventually, the reassuring bulk of the Lewis came into sight: all of her external lights, save one marking her port airlock, had been switched off, and we staggered towards it. Maybe I should have looked around, seen if any of the others were following behind us, but I was running on pure adrenaline and primal terror at that point. So instead I summoned up what reserves of strength I had left and pulled myself through the hatch. Soon as I had a grip on the first handhold, I turned and grabbed Parker, pulling her in behind me ever as the entire universe seemed to start spinning around me.

It wasn't until later that I was told that the rig had finally given up and started to come apart entirely, sending the _Lewis_ tumbling over the side. All I knew was that Parker was dangling, her legs out of the airlock as the hatch started to close. Even the thick metal of her environment suit wouldn't have protected her from being crushed, but I had seen too much death already that day. I don't know how I did it, because even the servos in the suit shouldn't have been able to, but somehow I lifted Parker up until her feet were just inside the airlock. And not a moment too soon, as it snapped shit beneath her.

Next thing we knew, we were being flung against the bulkhead as the main drive kicked in, the ships spinning around until her nose was pointed star-side, then that massive kick in the pants as the pilot pushed though the gate, engaging maximum power, sending us rocketing away from the rig like a bat out of hell.

It was a while before anyone decided to check on us: they had more questions than answers, and if it wasn't for the mission recorders built into our suits, I don't think they would have believed a word we said. As it was, we were the only two survivors from the habitation block, and with the _Clark_ gone... well, the mission was a damn near total failure. We joined back up with the _Sacagawea_ then boosted for the jump-point and the waiting JumpShip, the rest of the crew looking at us like we were cursed or something.

Been almost ten years since that day, and while I'm still a structural engineer, I keep my feet firmly on solid ground these days.

 **The End**


	8. The Most Dangerous Game

_I hope you all enjoy this one, because it's been a cast-iron bitch to write..._

 **The Most Dangerous Game**

Most people think that the Jihad ended in 3081, when Stone's forces took Terra. But the sad truth is, all these years later, there are still Blakist holdouts spread out across known space, and still people hunting them down.

I was part of one such unit; the 106th Reconnaissance Battalion, aka the Stray Dogs. We were a small, close knit team, all veterans of the Jihad, 100% battle hardened life takers and heart breakers. We'd been through hell and come out the other side, having stolen the Devil's lunch money on the way. We thought that we were invincible, that there was nothing that the universe could throw at us that we couldn't handle.

How wrong we were.

We were sent to New Dallas, which is about as close as you can get to hell as you can get. Between the damage done during the Fall of the Star League, then the early Succession Wars and the subsequent breakdown of the atmospheric processors, it's a hot, choking radioactive mess of ruined cities being slowly reclaimed by the native wildlife. A few species descendent from plants and animals brought in from off-world can still be found, but they've adapted to survive, and aren't the same any more. Especially the God-damn house cats.

Someone up in Intel had apparently uncovered evidence that the Blakists had been using New Dallas as a plant-sized training ground for some of their Manei Domini units, and as such it was decided to send in our unit to have a look around and report back anything interesting. We'd gone up against the Dommies more than once, so we went in locked, clocked and loaded for something a damn sight nastier than bear. Only problem was that they pulled our C/O at the last minute and lumbered us with Leutnant Colfia. Now, there are two kinds of officers in this 'verse; killin' officers and murderin' officers. Killin' officers are poor old buggers that get you killed by mistake. Murderin' officers are mad, bad, old buggers that get you killed on purpose - for a country, for a religion, maybe even for a flag. And it was well known that _Leutnant_ Colfia wanted to be _Hauptmann_ Colfia as soon as possible, regardless of how many poor sods she had to get killed to get there. As such, she took risks, only never with her own life, but she also go missions done, which is why the brass loved her and put up with the disproportionately high number of losses units under her command tended to take.

She was, in short, a completely self-serving bitch, and no one who survived serving under her was likely to shed a tear if she stepped on a landmine and was turned into human confetti.

Good thing about a unit like the 106th is they let you choose your own kit, meaning that we were decked out in the most eclectic assortment of battle armour you're ever likely to see. I'd long ago settled on the G13 variant of the _Tornado_ power-amour, preferably the smaller silhouette and the stopping power of the 'David' Light Gauss Rifle. I wasn't a sniper, but I had achieved the Designated Marksman award back in the FWLM before everything went to shit. And as back up, I had a little something Tai-i Shirogane had given me when we got word he was being replaced with Leutnent Colfia. And no, I have no idea how someone who started out in the DCMS got their hands on an experimental Lyran weapon like an _Adjudicator_.

Now, not many of you are likely to have even heard of an _Adjudicator_ , let alone seen one, so let me explain just what makes it so special.

You see, back before the Clan Invasion, nobody outside of ComStar had seen combat Battle Armour for centuries, so the appearance of Elementals... well, let's just say that a lot of people needed a lot of clean underwear afterwards. The concept of highly mobile, jump-capable infantry that could shug-off hits from 'Mech grade weapons was a complete Out Of Context Problem for a while, and R&D teams were throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. And the _Adjudicator_ is the end result of one such project that was ultimately scrapped in favour of GyroJet pistols and the like. If you want to imagine what an _Adjudicator_ looks like, take the biggest, _'I'm overcompensating for something_ ' hand-cannon you can think of, then make it about half as big again. Only rather than bullets better suited for demolishing a wall, it's loaded with these little metal containers of chemicals, and the firing pin is actually a tiny little laser. So, when you pull the trigger, that little laser fires into the rear of the chemicals, which in turn give you a much more powerful chemical laser out a barrel that's really just there to help you aim. And belive me, you want to be sure of what you're shooting at when you fire a weapon I've personally seen burn a hole through a 'Mechs cockpit visor.

Downside is that it generates a _lot_ of heat, so you need something with a fair bit of bulk to act as a rudimentary heatsink, and each pull of the trigger is worth about 1,000 C-Bills a go, so it's not the cheapest weapon on the market. On the upside, it's damn near silent, has no recoil, and looks intimidating enough to make a lot of people back down when they see it hanging on your hip. Shirogane said I might need something on hand for any unexpected happen. And given our line of work involved actively seeking out the unexpected, it was a reassuring friend to have at my side.

Standard operating procedure would have seen us get dropped off in a heavy APC or IFV a few kilometers from the primary target and then advance as we saw fit, but Leutnant Colfia vetoed that in favour of a nighttime HALO drop into the ruins of a nearby city, just so she could log another combat drop. HALO jumps can be difficult at the best of times, but trying to coordinate one while wearing heavily modified battle armour and jumping into an inhospitable atmosphere... we were only lucky we didn't lose anyone right off the bat. I was lucky enough to come down in a wide street, but a couple of the others had to make their way down from the tops of buildings that hadn't been maintained in centuries.

We were scattered across half the city, and it took us hours to join back up together, by which point is was starting to get light, so we had no choice but to call it quits for the day and find somewhere to hold up. Fortunately, they sent along a couple of _Broncos_ , little walking drones that can carry all sorts of equipment that you can't really strap to a suit of battle armour, including a small inflatable habitat module just big enough for half of us to sleep in outside of our armour. It's a bitch of a job to set up right, especially as you need to make sure that the decontamination unit is working properly, but at least you can get a few hours shut-eye and a bit of hot food down your neck. Those on watch had to make do with hooking their suits up to the other _Bronco_ , letting it supply them with power, air and water so as not to drain their suits systems.

Soon as darkness fell, we set out towards the Blakist base: a massive domed structure our recon satellites had picked up about ten kilometers outside the city. It wasn't easy going, as with between the fighting, lack of maintenance and exposure to a worsening environment, the roads were at times impassable, and we often had to take long detours around fallen buildings. I was walking scout, so I had the misfortune of being the first to fine evidence of what the Blakists had been up to. Biological material doesn't last long after death: bacteria, carrion eaters and the elements quickly break down everything, even bones given time, but what I found was fresh enough to still be identified as having been human.

But only just.

There's an unspoken rule that you're respectful of any remains you find, because you never know when you're going to be the one someone else finds. It's an age-old tradition amongst soldiers, something that takes a lot to override. So you can probably imagine, even if you'd rather not, that there wasn't much left to find. But even then, it was clear that they hadn't died quickly or cleanly, with some of them having been strung up on the rubble and left to suffocate when their air supply ran out. One had been in what looked like Elemental armour, and a quick checking of their Codex bracelet indicated that its late wearer had once been a Point Commander of Clan Smoke Jaguar, which was crazy because they'd been destroyed almost twenty years before. Other bodies were in uniforms that indicated a ragtag collection of Mercenary units and even a couple of ComsGuards, with no indication of how they'd ended up on New Dallas. People started accusing Leutnant Colfia of withholding information about previous missions to the planet, accusations she strongly denied, and I found myself believing her, much to my own surprise. So we cut them down, buried them as best we could, and moved on.

Despite the hell New Dallas had been through in the bast, we started to find evidence of more recent combat: scorching not warn clean by the passage of time, places where exposed metal had been damaged, leaving patches not yet fully tarnished by rust and corrosion. But we'd been expecting as much, given we were looking for a recently active trading base, so we didn't think much of it until we came across the burnout husk of a _Bolla_ Stealth Tank by the side of the road. Two of its wheels had been blown off, while someone had taken the time to arrange the severed heads of all three crewmembers on top of the turret. All evidence indicated that the vehicle had been travailing away from the Blakist base at high speed when it had been disabled, causing it to crash into the remains of what had once been a tenament building of some kind.

Soon we found more vehicles, military and civilian, scattered along the road, each and every one rendered inoperative, their passengers killed, bodies strewn around. Most had simply been left where they lay, others... we found some kind of bus or similar transport, each seat filled by a decapitated body, their heads arranged in a geometric pattern in the middle of the road.

Now, we'd all seen enough horrors during the Jihad to earn a Section-8 discharge if we'd asked for one, but I tell you, New Dallas was something else.

Eventually, we reached a low rise that looked out over the base we'd been sent to investigate: it had been built as a giant dome, separated into four equal quadrants with a central control tower rising out of the middle, making it look to all the world like a kids spinning top. Something had evidently exploded inside one of the quadrants, the structure bent and twisted outwards like burst seed pod, and our passive sensors were picking up no signs of heat or power from within. Normally, we'd have dug in and observed the base for a day or two, but the truth was, we were all getting a little bit jumpy, so when Leutnant Colfia suggested that we head straight in, we all agreed.

We moved in, standard two-by-two cover formation, the heavier suits keeping watch over the perimeter while our electronics expert hooked up a power-cell to one of the air-locks and ran a remote bypass. Fortunately, even the Blakists aren't stupid enough to forego standard safety protocols, so the default S&R code had the lock cycle, allowing us entry.

We soon wished that it hadn't.

I don't know if any of you have ever seen the aftermath of close-quarters combat, but it isn't pretty: few buildings are designed to withstand military grade weapons being fired inside them, and the Blakist base was no exception. The floor, walls and ceiling were pitted and scorched by laser and projectile fire, while some sections had obviously been ground-zero for explosions, given the way the metal was all torn and twisted. Someone had thrown a hell of a party, and hadn't hung around to clean up afterwards, that's for sure.

You probably have this mental image of us advising down a long, corridor with some hand-help scanner out front. Well, I hate to tell you this, but that only happens in the TriVids. Sure, motion trackers like that exist, but they're too easily spoofed to be of any real use in an active combat situation, so we were reliant on Mk.1 eyeballs. We made our way into the base, taking advantage of what cover there was, checking rooms and side corridors as we went, eyes on a swivel, always checking the corners.

Always check the corners when you first enter a room, or it'll eat you alive.

The place had been trashed: desks flipped over, paperwork and broken data-slates scattered on the floor, signs that several fires had raged without anyone trying to stop them. It certainly didn't look like we'd be finding much useful information unless the main control room was in better shape, so we made our way deeper into the dome. There wasn't enough of us to do a proper sweep, but we'd never been intended to be more than the proverbial canary down the mine, checking to see if it was safe to send in the REMF's. The damage only seemed to get worse the deeper we went, but the crazy thing was, we didn't find any bodies, not so much as a severed finger or missing ear. Place looked like a god damn carnel house, but not so much as a speck of blood to be seen. That was enough to make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, and even through their suits, I could tell the others felt the same.

Reaching the core we were surprised to discover that it still had a breathable atmosphere: the entire structure was compartmentalised in case of a breach, but with no power and all the damage we'd seen, we'd kind of assumed that the entire place was open to the elements, but we quickly set up an ad-hoc airlock and decontamination unit using the parts from the inflatable habitat. Lot of us weren't happy with that, but Leutnant Colfia pulled rank, and she wasn't in the mood to pole opinions.

Inside the core was in better shape: there was damage, but there were also signs that someone had done their best to patch up the worst of it and generally clean house. It was piss-poor in comparison to what a proper damage control party would do, but it was our first indication that someone had survived whatever had happened. Even though all the tests we could run indicated that the air was good, no one opted to pop the seal on their suits and take a deep breath: Blakists have a history of cooking up all kind of nasty surprises that standard tests can't detect, and we'd all seen the results first hand. But the closer we got to where we assumed that the control room was, the more... homely the pace seemed to be. Someone had, badly, painted the walls a soft shade of pastel green, and had evidently converted some of the offices into living space.

Now you can't exactly be light footed in military grade battle armour: even the most advanced suits still sound like a charging elephant on metal flooring, and even Leutnant Colfia wasn't crazy enough to try and order us to dismount and proceed on foot, so there was no point in playing coy.

"Hello?" amplified by her suits external speakers, the Leutnants voice echoed down the long, dark corridors.

We all stood, weapons at the ready but doing our best not to look too much like a team of highly trained and experienced commandos sent to make sure that the base was out of commission, one way or the other. A couple of us had been issued less-lethal weapons during the latter stages of the Jihad and never quite got around to handing them back, so we had them out rather than our regular extremely-lethal loads. I had a military grade tazer that I'd once used to stop a charging Elemental dead in their tracks.

"Hello?" the Leutnant called again.

There was the sound of something hitting the floor in the distance, and everyone got their game faces on as a faint glow appeared in a side corridor about twenty meters ahead of where I was standing. I tapped the transmit button on my radio, letting the Leutnant know that we had contact without having to actually speak, and she turned to look where I was pointing with my tazer. The light grew, then a pale face with unkempt mousey brown hair appeared around the corner, an emergency lamp held in a shaking hand.

What she saw was a dozen suits of heavily armed battle armour, and quite understandable took off like a frightened jackalope.

I was moving even before the Leutnant gave the order, but even under ideal circumstances, I was nowhere near as fast as someone _not_ wearing 400kg of armour and electronics. Add to that I had no idea of the layout of the base, and I was effectively running blind. The only advantage I had was the inferred view my HUD gave me let me easily track the lamp she was carrying as she bounced off walls and round corners until she slipped through a half-closed door into what looked to be some kind of storeroom. The door mechanism had been jammed to the point where even the enhanced strength of my power armour couldn't budge it. I didn't know if I had the time to cut through or wait for one of the others to catch up with a more powerful rig, so I powered down my armour and hit the quick release latch, offering up a silent prayer that the air was as safe as our sensors insisted. Stripped down to the light fatigues I wore under the armour, I eyed the _Adjudicator_ for a moment, then clipped it to back of my belt before grabbing the tazer, being sure to make sure that it was on one of the lower settings. I had to squeeze to get through the door, and was surprised at what I saw on the other side.

Someone had obviously spent a lot of time turning it into a refuge of sorts: the heavy shelving had been pushed to one side, making room for a small bed and an assortment of boxes that looked like they contained emergency rations. A small folding table had been set up in one corner, a scattering of personal effects laid out on top, including what looked like a family photo in a cheap frame. The sound of movement made me turn slowly, the flashlight in my hand settling over the woman as she huddled in the far corner, holding what looked like a scalpel out towards me defensively. Judging by the way her arm was shaking, she was more of a danger to herself than me.

"Hi." I did my best to sound nonthreatening as I switched the light from a sharp beam to a softly glowing orb, "My name's Billi. I'm not here to hurt you."

Her only response was to try and make herself look as small as possible, her eyes wide with terror.

"Can I sit?" I crouched down, trying to get a better look at her: she looked to be in her early to mid twenties, dressed in what looked like they had once been surgical scrubs that hung loosely on her slender frame, making her look like a kid playing dress-up in her parents clothing. There was a bandage on her left arm that looked reasonably fresh and professionally applied, and she looked and smelled surprisingly clean for someone who'd been living like a rat for god only knew how long. That said, I could practically smell the adrenaline pumping through her system.

She shifted, and I spotted a thin silver necklace round her neck, a tiny silver sword with a sapphire in the hilt hanging from it.

You'd run into them occasionally: true believers so indoctrinated to the cause that they simply can't accept that they were wrong, yet still good people. They tended to come from the Sol system or other worlds that had been under Blakist control long enough for kids to spend their entire lives growing up under it and reaching enlistment age. They'd fight like the devil himself, but not because of any malicious intent, but because they honestly think they're doing you a favour. Only good thing is that they tend to be less of a problem once captured, less prone to trying something stupid that just gets people killed, even as they assure you, with all the sincerity in the galaxy, that the Word of Blake will surely triumph over the forces of evil. I'm honestly not sure if that makes them any better to deal with than the foaming-at-the-mouth lunatics, truth be told.

I sat myself down across from her, far enough away to be out of easy slashing range.

"Ok, so I'm not going to lie to you or talk down to you like you're a kid or something." I took a deep breath, "Your side lost the war: we've taken Terra and the fighting is all but over now. There's only a few mop-up operations on planet like this left."

She looked at me, and I could tell she was trying to work out if I was telling the truth or not.

"Now, the good news is that we're not here to hurt you, like I said before." I did my best to sound reassuring, "Truth is, after we saw the state of this place, we thought everyone was dead..."

"They are dead." her voice was soft but hollow, with what sounded like a Rasalhaguian accent, "Everyone."

"OK." I nodded, finding no reason to disbelieve her after everything we'd seen outside, "What happened?"

She hesitated, the memory obviously not a pleasant one, but was about to answer when a massive, armoured hand grabbed the door and started to bend it open.

The woman bolted towards an open air vent quick as you like, but I'd been ready, and dived towards her, wrapping my arms around hers, pinning hers to her side even as she struggled to get free. She kicked and screamed and struggled, trying desperately to get away, but I'd been well trained in unarmed combat, and knew how best to restrain her without doing any permanent damage.

The door fully opened at last, the imposing bulk of a suit of Elemental armour appeared in the opening, and I recognised it as belonging to Órla Kabrinski, a Ghost Bear on detached duty to the 106th. She gave me an apologetic look, before stepping back to make room for Leutnant Colfia's IS Standard suit, the faceplate still closed.

"Report, Trooper." She ordered briskly.

"Making friends and influencing people, Sir." I managed a smile even as the survivor snapped her head back, earning me what I immediately knew was going to be a black-eye.

The Leutnant stepped aside, allowing Hudson, our medic, to step through the doorway. Like me, he'd taken off his power armour and had an inoculation gun in hand. Grabbing my new friend, he pressed the gun against her arm and pulled the trigger, flooding her system with a powerful tranquilliser. The young woman struggled against it, but it was designed to calm down combat troops high on adrenaline and combat stimulates, and it wasn't long before her struggling lessened and she eventually stopped fighting. I helped Hudson mover over to the bed and give her a quick medical check-up: aside from minor malnutrition and vitamin-D deficiency, no doubt from living in a metal box on a dust shrouded world, eating nothing but emergency rations for who knows how long. The bandage on her arm covered a nasty gash that was starting to heal, and showed signs of having been treated with standard broad-spectrum antibiotics.

We also found a laminated ID badge with her photo on.

"Carla Hentschel, nurse from the base medical staff." I handed the badge to the Leutnant, who quickly and quietly checked it against our records of wanted Blakists.

Lot of bad people did some very bad things before and during the Jihad, and all too many of them had slipped through the net when the tide turned against them. One of our jobs was to keep an eye out for anyone trying to lay low and avoid their due date with the hangman. But evidently Hentschel wasn't one of them, as the Leutnant simply nodded and pocketed the ID. Grabbing a bag I found discarded on the floor, I gathered up the handful of personal effects I could see: Blakist or not, they might be the only links to her old life left, and there was no way of knowing if we'd be able to swing back that way before we left.

We made our way to the main control room with a semi-lucid Hentschel in tow, only to find it almost completely destroyed by fire, the floor, walls and ceiling covered in soot, broken glass everywhere. Fortunately, the adjoining commanders office was in slightly better shape, and Leutnant Colfia, who was also our computer expert, set about trying to get the desk terminal back up and running. The rest of us started going through what physical files we could find, but it soon became clear that the fire had been started by incendiary charges built into the filing cabinets, no doubt intended to destroy the contents on command. However, not all of the files had been rigged to burn, and those that weren't had been kept in a cabinet that had been designed to withstand fire. Amongst the surviving documents were some of the personal files, and I prickly dug out Hentschels, confirming that she was nothing more than a nurse assigned to the base infirmary, with the lowest level of security clearance needed to be assigned to the base. She was, in short, a nobody, someone who'd survived whatever the hell had killed everyone else and wrecked most of the base through sheer luck.

People like to think that an organisation like the Word of Blake is full of irredeemable evil, mustache twiddling fiends dressed all in black, the kind of obviously evil demon in human form who can be easily spotted. But the truth is, the overwhelming majority of their membership was just ordinary people, the kind you pass in the street every day without a second look. Hentschel was nothing more than a qualified nurse who'd happened to be assigned to this particular base, when she just as easily could have been working in some random hospital in Terra. She wasn't necessarily evil or complicit in the crimes the Blakists committed... she was just a young woman with a job. Unfortunately, wars tend to chew up people like her, and spit out whatever was left, and there was no way of knowing if there was anything left on Terra for her to go home to.

I made a quick scan of the file: Intel was going to want to debrief her later, and it would give them a place to start.

"Stop your grinning and drop your linen." Leutnent Colfia announced, "I'm into what's left of their system."

Aside from the two assigned to guard the door, and Hudson, who was keeping an eye on Hentschel, we all gathered around the former base commanders desk as best we could as the display screen flickered to life. It was filled with static for a moment as the badly damaged system struggled to run corrupted data.

" _...day 19_." A man's voice announced, and the image cleared to show a man in a lab-coat, looking all the world like your typical scientist, " _Testing continues on the latest batch of volunteers from Manei Domini program. We lost Subject-9 today: his body rejected the first round of genetic manipulation, indicating a previously undetected medical condition that our preliminary tests failed to pick up on. I have submitted a revised list for the next phase. Blakes Will Be Done._ "

" _Day 103_." The video skipped ahead, _"As per my last report to Precentor Kernoff, we have move ahead to Phase Two ahead of schedule. Subjects-14 and 21 have proved to failures, the more extreme genetic modifications resulting in their DNA unravelling. We were forced to euthanize them. Blakes Peace Be Upon Them._ "

" _...236_." the image skipped again, the scientist looking agitated, " _Of the first batch of Subjects, only Subject-5 remains, the rest having either died due to some unforseen fault in their augmentation process, or as in the case of Subject-2, self-termination upon realising just how much of them had been changed. I had hoped that by selecting from those who'd already volunteered for the Manie Domini programme, we would be able to screen out those with too great an attachment to their physical form, but it seems that the Blessed Blake is using this opportunity to test both our resolve and our wisdom. His Will Be Done."_

 _"Day 300. The second batch of volunteers arrived today, two choosing self-termination after being introduced to Subject-5. We may have to limit his interaction with new subjects in the future, at least until they have a chance to come to terms with what exactly is being asked of them."_

" _... 7_." the video skipped again, and Scientist Guy seemed angry about something, " _We lost Subjects-29 and 34 during a training exercise in the Jungle Training habitat, both killed by Subject-5. I personally debriefed him afterwards, and he showed no remorse over their deaths, which is itself to an issue, but it's the reasoning he gave: 29 and 34 had been assigned to his team for the exercise, and he said that they were 'slowing him down', seeming to believe that that was all the justification needed. I know that what we are doing here is all part of the Blessed Blakes plan, but I sometimes feel that he is testing me personally_."

" _Day 327_." now he looked almost ill, " _As per Precentor Kernoffs orders, we are moving ahead with Phase Three: to implantation of a prototype C3 based wireless networking node into the most promising group of Subjects. I pushed for the Alpha-node to be given to Subject-42, but I was overruled, and it will instead be given to Subject-5._ " he paused and looked intently at the camera, " _I wish to go on the record as stating my objections to this decision in the strongest possible way. Subject-5 remains on the boarderline for acceptable behaviour, even with increasing doses of mood stabilisers and sessions with our best psychologists. I can not shake the feeling that maybe we went too far, removed too much of what made him human. I prey to Blake that I am wrong._ "

 _"...331_." He looked surprisingly happy as the next fragmented video started to play, " _All participants in the C3 experiment have survived surgery and are recovering. Even Subject-5 has shown remarkable improvement in both his general mental health and personal interactions with the medical staff. We have no way of knowing if this is some lingering side effects from the anaesthetic or an unexpected effect of the connection she now has with the rest of her team, but an improvement it is none the less. Truly, Blake smiles upon the work we are doing here._ "

" _... 47. At the insistence of Precentor St. Jamais, we conducted a live-fire exercise in the ruins of Caddo City. Against my better judgement, I agreed to allow the use of so-called 'Bondsman', Elemental warriors formally of Clan Smoke Jaguar, as the opposition force. They seemed eager for the chance to face an enemy in battle, preferring the opportunity to 'die in battle as warriors'. Well, they got their wish._ " the scientist looked pale, finding it hard to make eye-contact with the camera, " _I understand that we face great opposition to our appointed tasks, that there are those who will, in their ignorance, struggle against being brought into the Light, but still... They didn't just kill the Elementals: they tortured them to death for nothing more than the thrill of seeing the life slowly drain from their eyes. I... I understand that extreme measures may be necessary, but how can we save humanity if we resort to such barbarism?_ "

The screen was filled with static, indicating a mass of corrupted data, then the words 'Final Entry' appeared, and we all leaned in closer.

" _I don't know why I'm making this entry: Blakes will be done, and the nuclear failsafe will destroy the data core and everything else in this accursed place._ " The scientist looked almost mad, his normally pristine lab coat covered in soot and blood, " _Well, we did what were were told: expanded the number of subjects tied into the C3 net... Blake save us, we did exactly what Subject-5 wanted..._ " static played across the screen for a moment, " _He took control of the other test subjects... turned them I to little more than extentions of his own twisted mind. He then turned on us! Killed the medical team and had his subordinates begin turning them into...into spare parts to further enhance themselves. I gave the order to blow the dome, but it was too late: they'd already been upgraded to survive in inhospitable atmospheres. The security team.._ " he shuddered as the sound of weapons fire could be heard in the background, " _I've ordered the support staff to evaluate to a waiting DropShip, but I don't know if we can hold them off long enough. If they... If they get off planet... Blake help us, all we wanted to do was **protect** people from war..._"

There was an explosion, and he looked up at something off-screen, his eyes going suddenly wide with terror as what little colour remaining drained from his face. His hand shot up, pressing a hold-out laser pistol to the underside of his chin. He said something that the microphone failed to pick-up, then fired a bolt of coherent light up through his brains. The popular view of a laser weapon from movies and TriVids is a flash of light, a small burn-mark, and the victim falling down dead, nice and clean.

Reality isn't anywhere near as nice, and we got to see his eyes start to bulge out as all the liquid inside his skull was suddenly superheated before the screen thankfully went dark. We all looked up, and sure enough, there was a single burn mark in the ceiling above the desk, but no sign of the body.

"Pack it up." Leutnent Colfia's voice was cold and detached, "We're leaving."

For once, nobody questioned her order, and we set about collecting the surviving files and getting back into our suits. I helped Hudson get Hentschel into an emergency environment suite from one of the emergency kits: it wasn't much more than a pressure suit and a oxygen tank, but it would keep her alive until the shuttle could pick us up. The young nurses was still dazed from the tranquillisers, but with it enough to be more of a help than a hindrance, and she was even able to clutch the bag holding her personal effects.

It was at that point that the fecal matter hit the environmental control unit, as the old saying goes.

First clue we got that something was wrong was when we lost the signal to the _Broncos_ , then the alarms on our suits started screaming that the atmosphere was becoming tainted. Fortunately, everyone was already in their suits at the time, so it was just a case of snapping shut faceplates and hitting the over-pressure switch to purge anything nasty. Then came the unmistakable rattle of a Bearhunter Superheavy Autocannon as Connor, our resident Ghost Bear, opened up on something in the corridor outside. That first quick burst was followed by a second, drawn out barrage as he jerked his weapon around, evidently trying to get a solid lock onto something moving fast. Then came the _whoomp-bang_ of a grenade launcher, and the room shook.

One thing you learn when fighting the Blakists is that the best defence is a strong offence, so we charged out of the room, forming a perimeter in the wide hallway beyond. We'd expect to face Manei Domini, but what we found would have given even those freaks nightmares.

They'd been human, once, possibly more than one in some cases, but they'd been taken apart and put back together with what looked like the contents of the local scrapyard. Metal and flesh met in ways the Good Lord never intended, creating abominations with more arms, legs and even eyes then were normal. Some had weapons grafted onto their bodies: hands replaced with blades, lasers where eyes should have been. They seemed to be coming from somewhere deeper in the base, and it was very obvious that they weren't interested in a cup of coffee and a chat.

Someone gave the order to open fire, and we lit them up with everything at our disposal: the flash of lasers and man-pack PPC's blind us even as our visors struggled to compensate. I shouldered my gauss rifle and fired into the centre mass of _something_ , I don't know what, punching a fist sized hole right through it. I followed this up with a second shot to what I think was its chest, then a third through the head, just like they thought us in basic. Thankfully it went down, but for every one we killed, two more seemed to take their place. I saw Hudson go down, some kind of barbed spear through his chest, then watched wide-eyed as his body was pulled away by means of a cable attached to the other end.

Evidently Subject-5 was looking for fresh parts.

All semblance of a organised defence were soon lost: sometimes a single shot was all that was needed to put one of them down, sometimes it was like our weapons fire just bounced off them. Only our heaviest of weapons seemed to be able to guarantee a kill, and we had all to few of those. Even the heavy flamers seemed to do little more than turn them into flailing torches that rushed our lines, trying to set us on fire before the damage overcame their inhuman desire to kill. I don't know who broke first, but it soon spread. I grabbed Hentschel by the arm, dropping my by then empty rifle and drawing the Adjudicator. I gave one last loom over my shoulder: Leutnent Colfia was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Órla and Connor, the three holding the line as the rest of us ran for our lives.

There aren't many things in my life I'm ashamed of: you don't last long in this line of work without becoming cynical as hell, but I'll admit that I regret every bad word I ever said or thought about Leutnent Colfia.

The automapping system in my suit already had the way-point marker set, making sure I didn't get lost, and while the _Tornado_ may not be the fastest thing on the battlefield, in close confines, it's quicker and more agile than most. Hentschel did slow me down a little, but it never occurred to me to let her go, and the sight of what was following us seemed to have cut through the dug induced haze that had enveloped her. Up ahead, I saw something that looked for all the world like a giant scorpion come crashing down out of the ceiling, and I brought the _Adjudicator_ up and fired almost on reflex. A bolt of sapphire blue light connected the two of us for an instant, and a dark hole appeared on one of its arms. I fired again, adjusting my aim, this time burning through one of its legs. Myomer snapped and burned, but even the loss of a leg didn't seem to slow it down as it turned to face us with a disturbingly human looking face.

I fired four more times and the face was a blackened, burnt-out mess, the cybernetic creature little more than dead metal.

Another cyborg, this one almost human looking, except for the two long scythe like blades where its hands should have been stood waiting by the impromptu airlock, and I fired the last two shots from the _Adjudicator_ through its chest, dropping it like a puppet with the strings cut. I dropped the pistol back into the holster: I hadn't the inclination to stop and reload any time soon. Through the airlock and we were back out into the blasted remains of the base, my comslink filled with the screaming of my teammates as they fell, one by one, to the Blakists. Some of you might say that I should have gone back, should have tried to help them, but to hell with you all! I've faced death enough times that it no longer holds much fear for me, but I'd be damned before I became part of that sick, twisted army of half-human puppets.

We were quickly outside, and I activated my suites emergency beacon, preying to a God I was no longer so sure existed that the shuttle got to us first. Dragging Hentschel behind me, I just chose a direction at random and ran as hard and asop fast as my suit would allow me. I felt her stumble and fall, and almost instinctively threw her over one shoulder in a crude fireman's lift.

I think, if I had to put I to words why I felt such a need to save her life, it was because I needed to see some good come out of the hell that was New Dallas. Blakist or not, she was still an innocent, and there are all too few of those left in this galaxy.

A new icon appeared on my HUD, indicating that the shuttle was coming down hard and fast, the rendezvous set for just under a klick away. The thought of impending rescue lent my legs fresh strength, and I stumbled on as fast as I could. We reached the extraction point just as the shuttle was setting down, and the hatch was barely open before I all but fell through it, dropping Hentschel unceremoniously onto the deck. I yelled at a startled crewman to close the hatch and tell the pilot to burn hard for orbit, but they'd been expecting a full team, not one crazy woman and a stranger in an emergency suit.

In the end I drew the still empty _Adjudicator_ and waved it at the man: he had no way of knowing that it wasn't loaded, and slammed his hand down on the close button and told the pilot to red-line the engine. I could feel the g-forces pushing down on me, almost crushing me, but every second took us further and further away from New Dallas.

Docking with the waiting DropShip, I turned myself over to the waiting intelligence officer, handing over my weapon and the mission data recorder from my suit. I spent the better part of a week locked in a cabin while they waited for someone else from the mission to activate their be on, but in the end, they were forced to accept my version of events, especially as it was supported by the MDR. We were ordered out-system by someone very high up, and arrived back at the JumpShip just in time to see an honest-to-God warship arrive in system, apparently with orders to burn the entire continent down to the bedrock.

I never found out if they did follow through, or if they were dumb enough to try and send another team down, but it's been almost ten years and the Inner Sphere hasn't been taken over by crazed cyborgs, so I guess we're doing alright.

 **The End**


	9. Fair Fight

_OK, so this one is going to be a bit different from the rest..._

 **Fair Fight**

There's this story, a kind of urban legend, that's popular among MechWarriors across the Inner Sphere and beyond. There's countless variations, but the basic facts are always the same.

So there's this planet, usually agreed to be in Capellan space, that gets attacked: some people say it was the Fed Sun's, some the Leaguers, a few even the Terrans Hegemony, doesn't matter. But this world is home to an order of Buddhists Monks who live in a temple atop this hill overlooking the capital, which puts them slap-bang in the middle of the raiders line of advance. Everyone tells them to get the hell out of there, but they're not having any of it: their faith is resolute and their spirits strong enough to defend their holy temple from any attack.

A scout for the raiders turns up and sees that the temple is s till occupied, so they likewise advise them to get with running away. And again, they're told that the monks aren't moving, and anyone who threatens their temple will pay the price. Well, the scout isn't getting paid to hang around, so they take off, giving the monks one last worning.

Now I get honour and defending your home and all: it's why I joined the military in the first place, but there's a very thick line between honour and stupidity.

So anyways, along comes the main force of the raiders: couple of companies worth of BattleMechs, all planning on making a straight line to the capital, regardless of who or what is in their way, and the head monk is waiting out front for them, head bowed, summoning up his Chi or whatever. He waits until the lead 'Mech, a _BattleMaster_ in the version I first heard, is just in front of him. He suddenly drops his robes off his shoulders and charges forward, one fist pulled back ready to strike. He let's out a banshee like roar and let's fly with his fist, putting everything he has, mind, body and spirit into it... and promptly breaks every single bone in his hand.

 ** _Every. Single. One._**

Even those little ones in his fingers.

Shatters them.

The 'Mech? Doesn't even notice him as it continues on _through_ the temple.

Moral of this story? Don't try and punch a BattleMech, I guess.

But I'm a aerospace pilot, so I seldom have to worry about crazy people trying to punch me while I zip around overhead. And I told you this story not only to get a cheap laugh out of you, but to better set the scene for what I'm about to tell you, which I can assure you is 100%, cross my heart and hope to be dispossessed, really did happen. It dates back to when I had a gig with the Explorer Corps, and we were making a stop off at Cyclops Station.

For those of you who've never been there, Cyclops Station is something else. Originally a _Potemkin_ class transport called the SLS _Cyclops_ , she was abandoned when she suffered one of those nasty little 'hiccups' during a jump that left half the crew dead and the KF-core a half-molten mess of titanium and germanium. They probably intend to go back and salvage her, but then the Star League fell and everything went to hell in a hand-basket. So instead she was picked almost clean by pirates and scavengers until she fell under the control of a surprisingly enterprising Pirate King who had the bright idea of turning her into a space station. He spent years and every single credit he'd earned doing it, but in the end he'd turned a derelict ship into one of the few relatively safe Free-Ports in that part of the Periphery. Lot of people make use of Cyclops Station as a way point headed into or out of the Inner Sphere, and that canny Pirates descendents get 10% of all the business done, right off the top.

The Explorer Corps stumbled upon it back around 3040 or so, and have kept a low-key presence there ever since. We were waiting for our jump-drive to recharge, so the boss lady decided to give us a few days Liberty, least those of us she felt she could trust on Cyclops Station. Thankfully, I was one such aerojock, which is how I found myself in a small bar on one of the gravdecks, sipping something they claimed was whisky and I wasn't in the mood to question. It was a relatively quiet place by local standards, which is why a couple of members of a Clan Diamond Shark trade delegation decided to stop by.

Now, don't get me wrong: I have no more desire to live under the jack-booted foot of the Clans any more than the next freedom loving Lyran, but the Sharks are actually kind of decent people. Still walk around like their shit don't smell, but you can actually sit down and do business with them. You can spot a Shark trade envoy easily enough: just look for someone dressed in a conservative but well-made suit, with either a lapel pin or signet ring bearing the Clan's insignia. Also helps that they tend to be accompanied by a couple of warriors, usually Elementals, especially if they're looking to make a statement. And very little makes a statement like two-and-a-half of muscle and belligerent intent.

Well, this Shark was a sterne looking woman sat at a table with some guy dressed in the ubiquitous jumpsuit of a spacer, unsurprisingly devoid of any unit patch or rank insignia. He'd evidently been drinking harder and longer than she had, gagging by the somewhat glazed expression on his face and the way his hand was creeping closer to her knee. I gave him about fice centimeters before it was removed, possibly permanently, by one of the two warrior cast members riding shotgun on the merchant. The first was a striking woman, skin as black as night with a faint fuzz of copper coloured hair. I know enough about Clan insignia to tell she was a MechWarrior, a Star Captain by the gold and green shoulder patches on her field uniform. And she was all business, keen eyes constantly scanning the room, her back against the wall so nobody could sneak up behind her.

Honestly, I was kind of impressed.

Her companion, on the other hand... look, every military in human history has a few examples of people who have no right being in uniform and the knuckle-dragger sat on the other side of the merchant was a prime example. He was clearly an Elemental, and a big one at that, his battle-scared head shaved bald. But if it wasn't for his ill-fitting uniform, I might have mistaken him for a pirate: while the other two Clanners sat up straight with near textbook posture, he was slumped back in a chair that was only just big enough to hold him. There was also a look about him, almost like a wild animal that knew with absolute certainty that he was the single deadliest person in the room, if not the station. Cyclops Station has very strict rules about bringing weapons on board, and I doubted anything on the acceptable list of would so much as slow him down.

I found my checking how close the nearest exit was.

Truth is, I wasn't paying them much attention: I was more interested in finishing my drink before I had to get back to the waiting shuttle, so I didn't notice that the 'waitress' serving their table was dressed in ill-fitting clothes and was lacking even the faintest hint of makeup. I did, however, notice the Bondcord on her right wrist, and the somewhat sullen look in her eyes. She placed four glasses down on the table and took half a step back, only to let out a surprised shriek as the Elemental grabbed her and pulled her down onto his lap. He lent in close and whispered something into her ear that made her eyes go wide and what little colour there had been drain from her face, which only made the Elemental laugh.

What can I say? It's a rough, unforgiving universe, especially that far from 'Civilisation', and I wasn't about to get my neck snapped for a total stranger.

"I do not believe that the young lady is seeking your attention." a strong voice called out from across the bar, which suddenly became very quiet.

If the Elemental heard, he made no sign.

"I would ask that you remove your hand from her shoulder and apologise for whatever it is you said to her." the voice called out again, and this time I was able to zero in on who said it.

It was a tall man, at least by non Elemental standards, dressed in a grey tunic with some kind of cape sling over his shoulders, the clasp of which was fashioned like a coat of arms. But hey, the Periphery is home to countless worlds, each with their own idea of what's fashionable. He had piercing blue eyes and greying hair, but he held himself with an aura of authority and nobility that you don't expect to find somewhere like Cyclops Station. His companion was a younger man, dressed the same, but sitting back in his chair, a stein of beer in his hands, an amused expression on his face.

"FREEBIRTH!" The Elemental hissed as he stood, something that took a while, given how tall he was. He stalked over to the other table, looming over the older man like an advancing glacier, "She is my Bondswoman, taken in battle, and I will say and do to her as I wish."

If he'd been looking to intimidate the Good Samaritan, he failed, as the man stood, his expression calm and composed.

"You are a warrior, a man of honour, or at least you claim to be." the old man locked eyes with the Clanner, "Tell me, is this how an honourable man treats a defenceless young woman where you come from?"

The Elemental sneered in response, drawing back a fist the size of a sledgehammer, ready to strike.

"Giddion." the Star Captains voice sounded like a crack of thunder in the silent bar, the unspoken order behind the name breaking through her subordinates rage and making him relax slightly.

"So, you consider yourself a man of honour?" the sarcasm dripping from his voice was almost palpable, "Care to prove it in a Circle of Equals?"

"Ah, one of your Trials of Possession?" a faint smile flickered across the shorter man's face, "And the stakes?"

"Her freedom." the Elemental clocked his head towards the startled young woman, the looked at his opponent with a killers eyes, "Your life."

"I believe that the phrase is 'Bargained Well And Done'." the Good Samaritan took off his Cape, folded it and laid it across the back of his chair, before gesturing towards an open area where, on occasion, live music might be performed, "Shall we?"

Bar patrons moved out of the way, but only so they could get a better view of the free entertainment, while the barman started taking bets. If I haven't made it clear by now, Cylops Station isn't your usual port, and the kind of people who gather there tend to have a somewhat fatalistic outlook on life, knowing full well that it is often short and violent. The Good Samaritan reached the stage area first, turning to wait for the Elemental who was approaching like a malevolent storm. He eventually reached the open area and smiled.

"We call upon all those present to bear witness to what follows." he announced, holding his arms wide open, "One battle has started, let none interfere until honour is satisfied."

" _Seyla_." the Star Captain and the Merchant spoke as one.

The older man simply nodded, standing with his hands clasped behind his back.

With a roar that seemed to shake the bulkheads, the Elemental charged forward, his right fist swinging round like a wrecking-ball. The Good Samaritan simply lent back and to the side, allowing it to sail past him without so much as rustling his hair. The Elemental staggered to a halt, seemingly surprised to have missed his target, only to find the other man standing behind him. Clenching his fists together, the Elemental spun around, clearly intending to take the other man's head clean off his shoulders, only for his opponent to drop down and reverse direction, once again popping back up behind his far larger opponent.

And that was how the fight went on: the Elemental telegraphing strikes that would probably kill if they ever actually connected, and the Good Samaritan simply not being where his opponent expected him to be, moving with a fluid grace at odds with his apparent age. The longer the fight went on, the angrier and sloppier the Elemental became. I have to admit, I found myself impressed with the older man's technique: all he had to do was wait until the neanderthal he was fighting committed to a strike, and simply move somewhere else. It was a skill any soldier in their right mind could appreciate, and out of the corner of my eye, I could see that he had impressed the Star Captain, if not her subordinate.

"Savashri!" the Elemental spat, showing no sign of tiring, "Fight me, you dishonorable Surat!"

In response, the Good Samaritan waited until his opponent swung another wild punch, then finally struck back. His hands moved almost too fast for my eyes to follow, but I saw him jab the bigger man three time; twice in the upper arm, once in the shoulder. The moves were measured and precise, and the result was instantaneous.

The Elementals arm suddenly dropped to his side, limp and non-responsive. He looked at it in utter bewilderment for a moment, shaking his shoulder to try and get it to respond. But it just hung there, uselessly. He let out a mighty roar as he swung his other arm round, but the Good Samaritan simply ducked under it and came up the other side, striking at that arm as he had the first, leaving it to hang just as lifeless.

"The paralysis is only temporary." he stood before the confused Elemental like a school teacher addressing a particularly unruly pupil, "It should wear off in an hour or so. But I believe I have won this contest, and as such, the young woman's freedom."

The room was silent, save for the omnipresent hum of the air circulation system and the distant chatter of voices out in the corridor. Nobody knew what to think: they had expected to see an Elemental do what he had been bred for, not see an older and far smaller man make a mockery of him with little to no apparent effort. The universe just didn't work that way, not in real life. But we had all seen it with our own, mostly two, eyes, and there was no debating who had won the fight.

The Elemental disagreed with that last part.

Swaying back, he rocketed his head forward, intending to crash it into his enemy like a hammer blow from the gods... only to find himself instead encouraging the Good Samaritans hand coming the other way, his outstretched finger jabbing the Clanner almost dainty on the temple. The Elemental staggered back, more out of shock than anything, his disbelief quickly turning to fresh rage as he realised that his opponent had turned his back and was walking away.

"Get back here!" he demanded, not seeming to notice the faint trickle of blood that was starting to run down his head from his nose and ears, "We are not finished yet!"

"The fight is over." the Good Samaritan paused, a sad expression on his face, "You are already dead."

The Elemental looked confused for a moment, then suddenly fell forward like a tree, landing with enough force to shake the entire bar.

There was a moment of silence, then the room exploded with noise as people started to argue about what happened. But the Good Samaritan ignored them all as he walked over to the table where the two remaining Diamond Sharks and their suddenly very sober companion were sitting. He looked at the Star Captain, who simply nodded her head.

"My dear." the man held out his hand to the visually shocked and confused Bondswoman, "If you would like to join us, we'll get that bracelet off of you, then see what we can do about getting you home safely."

I tell you, it was the damnedest thing I have ever see.

 **The End**

 _Cyclops Station is something I came up with more than ten years ago and decided would make the perfect setting for this snippet. Feel free to make use of in campaigns if you wish: just remember to give credit where due. Stats can be found on the official BattleTech forum._


	10. Divine Intervention

_Buckle up, because shit's about to get biblical!_

 **Divine Intervention**

 _Never shall innocent blood be shed, yet the blood of the wicked shall flow like a river._

 _The Three shall spread their blackened wings and be the vengeful, striking hammer of God_

Everyone sent into Machen Pass knew we were being sent to die.

The 3rd Benjamin Regulars were rolling up the valley like an express Maglev, and the only chance we had to stop them before the capital was to slow them down long enough for the rest of the Militia to regroup and dig-in. Unfortunately that meant leaving a mix bag of 'Mech's, armour and infantry to hold the only pass leading out of the North end of the wide valley for as long as possible. But we knew that it was a one-way mission, we knew what was being asked of us, and no-one backed down: this is Kentares IV, and we know the Mercy of the Dragon.

Some of us wrote letters to our famalies, other prayed, got drunk or found someone willing to have one last roll in the sack with. I personally spent every last credit I had on a genuine, real beef stake, figuring that I should at least have a decent last meal. It cost almost a months wages, but by God and all his angles, I've never eaten anything half as good.

Dawn found us on the firing line, the rest of the militia having pulled out under the cover of darkness. I know in all the TriVids, this would be the part where someone stands up and gives a rousing speech about Honour, Duty and the House Davion, but real life isn't like that. We knew what was being asked of us, and we all knew that we'd die where we stood. My family may have emigrated to Kentares after the Massacre, but it was my home, and I'd spent my entire life being told the story of what happened back in the First Succession War. I have a sister and two nephews in the capital, and I would be damned if I let any Drac bastard get anywhere near them while there was still breath in my body. Technically I was the gunner on a _Schrek_ , an old, second-line model that had long ago had its PPC's and fusion reactor stripped out and replaced with a trio of AC/5's and a stinking old ICE that had a nasty habit of backfiring. Not that it was likely to happen that day, given that the sappers had dug a pit for the _Schrek_ to be driven into, then covered the lower hull with earth and rocks, turning it into an ad-hoc turret.

Technically, they'd left the rear hatch clear, and I had a rifle and pack ready to go, but nobody actually expected me to make use of them, and I'd handed the ammo over to a couple of ground-pounders. They'd be able to make better use of it than I ever would. I looked up at the maxim some long forgotten tanker had etched into the armour just above the gunsight:

 _Out of fuel, become a fortress. Out of ammo, become a bunker. Out of time, become a hero._

Well, there was nothing but heroes in Machen Pass that day.

The sappers had rigged the pass with every smoke charge they could lay their hands on or build from scratch in time, filling the valley with a thick, artificial fog that played hell with visuals and thermal sensors, forcing the Snakes to get in close, close enough that even our outdated, ill-maintained weapons could kill them if we got the chance. It mean't we couldn't see shit, but a network of hard-lines had been rigged up, at least allowing the forward observation posts to give us a warning before they got over-run. Not that any died easy: every fox-hole had an inferno-SRM, heavy machine-gun or morter, with satchel charges and sticky-bombs at the ready.

HQ may have sent us to our deaths, but they at least made sure we could make the bastards pay for every step they took into the pass.

It was a little after dawn when the first reports of Drac scouts started to filter in: I guess they didn't like the idea of trying to force the pass in the dark. Snipers took out their infantry, forcing them to send in battle armour and IFV's, which started to take fire from the heavier weapons, so they had no choice but to send in the BattleMechs. It was nothing short of a nightmare, being stuck alone in that _Schrek_ , listening to my comrades dying, knowing that any moment, it might be my turn. My entire world consisted of the gunsight, the joystick in my right hand and the radio, everything else fading away. I wasn't a young man who'd joined the militia because he was stupid enough to think women might be impressed by the uniform. I wasn't some random cubicle monkey who spent his 9-to-5 filling out shipping invoices. No, I was nothing but a fire-control system.

It didn't take long for the fighting to reach me: an already damaged off-white _Panther_ stumbled out of the smoke, its pilot evidently disorientated. I quickly rotated the _Schrek's_ turret until the targeting radical pulsed gold and pulled the primary trigger, sending three streams of 90mm death screaming into it. Armour flaked and fell as it staggered backwards, knocked off balance by the force of the attack. But I followed it without needing to even think about it, keeping the crosshairs over the centre torso as best I could, but between muzzle lift and the _Panther_ stepping into a shell crater, it started to fall backwards.

All three streams of autocannon shells connected with the 'Mech' s head, ripping through it, and the pilot inside.

I had no time to contemplate my first kill, as a _Galleon_ support tank rumbled into view on my left flank, its medium laser bitting into the armour on my turret as I struggled to bring my weapons back round. Unfortunately, the _Galleon_ wasn't staying put, but rather continued to move forward, managing to keep ahead of my guns even as it continued to pump megajoules of laser energy into my already weakened armour. Then a pair of infantryman appeared, one lobbing a pair of satchel charges into the tanks tracks, the other one giving it a one-two hit from a shoulder-launched SRM. The satchel charges lifted the right side of the _Galleon_ off the ground, and I saw sections of track and bogies flying free, then the SRM's exploded just short of the front armour, spraying the already damaged vehicle with burning napalm. It wasn't enough to totally kill the light tank, but it was enough to keep the crew occupied burning the ground-pounders down with their twin small lasers while I finished bring my autocannons round.

The _Schrek's_ guns barked, and depleted uranium tipped death tore through the _Galleon_ , gutting it in less than a minute.

I didn't have time to revell in my victory, as an entire squad of _Raiden_ battle armour came leaping out of the smoke. They were too fast and too agile for me to track, as the moment I thought I had one in my sights, it would suddenly change direction whole its companions picked away at my rapidly demonising armour with thier small lasers. I felt sure that my time was running out, so I resorted to simply spraying out as many shells as I could in the hopes of hitting something purely by law of averages.

But then it started: an Arrow IV struck the ground amid the Snakes, tossing them through the air like a child discarding unwanted toys. They landed in broken heaps, a few moving slightly as their injured pilots struggled to regain their footing. But more missiles came, a seeing unending barrage, the force of the explosions clearing the smoke, revealing the battlefield. Only a handful of the Militia units remained in fighting condition, surrounded on all sides by the advance guard of the 3rd Benjamin Regulars. Only the artillery missiles fell with unnerving accuracy, every one finding a 'Mech, tank or infantry squad to decimate. I saw a bone-white _Atlas_ stagger as it took a direct hit to the shoulder, blowing an arm clear off, followed by two more than simply shattered its body, the head flying high on a pillar of smoke and flame as the pilot ejected. Others were less lucky, with the inexplicable rain of death striking cockpits or setting off ammunition explosions that gutted 'Mechs and vehicles like.

I turned my turret around to find a trio of truly ancient looking _Archer's_ in the blood red of the Draconis March Militia standing in a line, half hidden by the remaining smoke. Each was covered in the scars of battle, one missing both arms, yet they continued to unleash death and destruction upon the invaders. And the Snakes had nothing that could touch them at such a range, forcing them pull back out of the pass or face utter obliteration. I fired the last of my autocannon rounds into their backs as they retreated into the smoke.

When I looked back, the Archer's were gone, the only sign they had ever been there the dead and broken Draconians they left strewn across the pass.

Those of us who survived pulled back to the extraction point, surprised by just how many of us there were. Then the radio sprung to life with word that the 10th Lyran Guards were burning hard for the planet, having learned of the Combine raid while passing through the system. The unexpected arrival of an entire RCT had the 3rd Benjamin in full retreat, looking to get off planet before they were caught dirt-side.

We reported what had happened in Machen Pass, all of us looking to thank the three _Archer_ pilots who'd saved our arses, only for HQ to insist that there were no Arrow IV equipped BattleMechs on the planet, and certainly no _Archer's_ of the type we described. Indeed, a check of Militia records showed that none had served on the planet since the First Succession War, the last three being destroyed while fighting to hold the Combine in Machen Pass...

 **The End**


	11. Upon A Pale Horse

_The format of this may come across as odd if you haven't ready the_ Interstellar Players _source books_

 _And a shout-out to Tex of the Black Pants Legion, whose video on the Amaris Coup inspired this story_

 **Upon A Pale Horse**

 _Those of you who have been following me for a while know that rumour and hearsay are my stock and trade, but that I never publish anything that I haven't at least been able to independently verify with a secondary source, but, well, there are exceptions to every rule._

 _I think we all know the story of the original Royal Boack Watch Regiment: they were, without a doubt, the single most elite unit in the old SLDF. They were the best trained, best equipped and best led soldiers in human history, each and every one a graduate of the almost legendary Gunslinger Program, unmatched in all of explored space. Even the Clans, with their centuries of selective breading and technology advancement have trouble coming close to same standards as the Black Watch. They were the Royal Bodyguards of House Cameron, tasked with defending the First Lord and their family against any and all who might seek to do them ill, and despite his best planning, they came close to ending the Usurpers coup even as it started._

 _Even after Fortress Cameron was hit by multiple nuclear weapons, two Lance's of the Black Watch held up the 4th Amaris Dragoons as they attempted to link up with the Usurper in Unity City, fighting so hard they he had to resort to sacrificing his own troops to hold them in place while a tactical nuclear device was used to finally wipe them out. And even then, survivors managed to escape and form the Ghost of the Black Watch Guerrilla movement that plagued Amaris until the day he died._

 _But I'd bet my last C-Bill that many of you don't know the legend of the Four Horseman._

 _Nobody knows just who the Horseman were. It's not even known if they were members of the Black Watch, but they certainly seem to have had access to highly advanced Star League technology, including the Chameleon Light Polarization Shield and the Null Signature System, effectively rendering their BattleMechs invisible. And they used this advantage to cut a bloody swathe through Amaris' forces, both on Terras and across the Hegemony._

 _The first recorded action by the Horseman took place on Terra, when the depleted 4th Amaris Dragoons were trying to rebuild their strength after their battle with the Black Watch. They'd taken over a SLDF training range on Baffin Island, and had spread out by battalion to engage a variety of holographic targets. Two days into the exercise, a snowstorm cut off the command company, forcing them into the Baffin Mountains. It was there that they came under attack by an unknown enemy that quickly dispatched the bodyguard lance before hunting down and destroying the other 'Mech's one by one. The radio waves were filled with desperate calls for help, confused voices trying to identify the attackers or even just where they were. The rest of the 4th Dragoons rushed to the last reported location of the command company. But by the time they get there, all they find is the broken, burning remains of twelve heavy and assault class BattleMechs, each one the funeral pyre of its pilot._ _A massive land, air, sea and space search was launched to try and find the attackers, but they don't find so much as a spent shell casing or drop of coolant._

 _Assuming that it must have been local partisans, a company from the Greenhaven Gestapo was sent in to "make an example" of a small town._

 _They never arrived: the same mysterious force ambushed them within sight of the town, taking down each of the Mercenaries with a single shot to the cockpit. It was this battle, if you could call it that, the only one known to leave living witnesses, that gave birth to the legend of the Four Horsemen, as the witnesses claimed that the ambush had been carried out by just four assault class BattleMechs._

 _A snow white_ Highlander _, a blood red_ Cyclops _, a jet-black_ Thug _and a bone white_ Atlas II _._

 _Stories soon began to spread, first across Terra, then to the rest of the_ _Hegemony. Convoys ambushed, fire bases wiped-out, senior field commanders killed. It got so bad that many of Amaris's senior advisors refused to leave the apparent safety of Unity City or stayed in orbit, turtles up on board DropShip. People were actively mocking the Usurper, and the harder he tried to crack down, the worse things got. Units sent out to commit reprisals were slaughtered wholesale, carefully laid traps turned into bloodbaths for the units laying in wait. Nothing he did could uncover the identity of the Four Horsemen, let alone locate their base of operations or how they managed to move around seemingly at random._

 _Then they struck Luna, destroying a number of DropShip loading Helium-3, followed by attacks on Mars and Titan. Everywhere the Horsemen went, the story was the same: they appeared out of nowhere, attacked a specific target, then vanished into nothingness. They became the boogieman for the occupation forces, the monsters hidden under your bunk, ready to strike in the middle of the night._

 _There's no way that every attack accredited to the Horseman was actually them: in just one day, they supposedly hit New Earth, Outreach,_ _Epsilon Indi and Ko, a feat physically impossible, assuming that you believe that they were actually physical BattleMechs, and not the vengeful wraiths that many started to believe. Over the fourteen years of the Star League Civil War, the Horsemen were accredited with over two thousand confirmed kills on planets all across the Terran_ _Hegemony. And not a single confirmed recording of one of their attacks survived, with less than one hundred people living to tell of one of their attacks, none of them intended targets._

 _The last confirmed sighting of the Four Horsemen was on Terra during Operation Liberation. The Second Legion of Fire had taken up position inside one of the Arcologys that made up the Greater Tokyo Area. They used the civilian population as human shields, snipping at SLDF forces as they attempted to re-take the city. Unwilling to risk the massive collateral damage of a direct assault, the SLDF commander on the ground was looking over options when reports started to come in of weapons fire being heard coming from within the Arcology._

 _Fearing that the mercenaries had started killing their hostages, the SLDF troops prepared to launch a full on assault, only to be shocked when a Legion of Fire_ Phoenix Hawk _emerged from the underground parking complex, running full speed towards the Star League lines. The pilot screamed over every frequency that they surrendered, only for a single gauss rifle round to emerge from within the smoke-filled Arcology, decapitating the fleeing BattleMech, killing its pilot instantly. For the merest of moments, the smoke cleared enough to show the right arm, upper torso and head of a stark white_ Highlander _, before it vanished from sight._

 _The single gun-camera recording of this incident remains the only direct evidence that the Four Horsemen ever existed._

 _Upon entering the Arcology, the SLDF forces found the Second Legion of Fire slaughtered, yet no sign of just who, or what, had almost effortlessly killed two battalions of battle-hardened troops. Officially, it was put down to infighting between those who wanted to surrender and those who wanted to go down fighting, but there were few who believed this version of events._

 _Since that day, there has never been a recorded sighting of the Horsemen or their distinctive 'Mechs. Nor is there any indication that they rejoined the victorious SLDF._

 _At least, that's the_ official _story._

 _-_ Starling

 **The End**


	12. Off The Edge Of The Map

_Making use of a unit I created years back as part of a joke. And colourful language, because, well, pirates._

 **Off The Edge Of The Map**

Yeah, I'm a pirate.

What? You expect me to make some excuses?

Look, you took the time and effort to track me down here, so you know who I am and what I did. So, yeah, I'm a pirate, or at least I was before too many years in space behind inadequate and poorly maintained radiation shielding caught up with me. And judging by the way the docs keep pumping me full of the good stuff, I ain't got much time left before I'm face-to-face with Old Scratch, so it's not like you'll be putting me on trial, and believe me, killing me would be doing me a favour.

I signed up with Calico Jack Rackham about three months after he was elected leader of his crew, after old Walker D. Plank was killed on a raid. And that's something that a lot of people don't understand about some pirate crews: we ellect our Captain from among the members. Everyone has a vote, and everyone is free to put their name forward, no reprisals. All open and fair, like. Not every outfit operates like that, but ours did. You get five minutes to state your case, then someone neutral, usually the cook or the doc, calls a vote. Whoever gets the most votes is the new Captain, and that's the end of it. Sure, people try and 'contest the count', but that's seen as going against the will of the crew, so it's not exactly good for your health, if you catch my drift. But Calico Jack was an old-hand by that point, so nobody actually stood against him, and the crew accepted his leadership without question.

Well, almost everyone: I wasn't there when Revy Two-Hands quit, but they were still repairing the damage to the _Lady Luck_ when I arrived.

What happened? Well, I only heard this second hand, but apparently someone back in the Combine got in touch, said they could get her a pardon, a chance to visit her husbands grave, if she'd tell them everything she knew about some corrupt officers. She took the deal, but the bounty ISF had on her couldn't be lifted until she'd testified, and a couple of the less honourable members of the crew figured that if she wasn't one of them any more, they might as well try and collect on it. Suffice to say, it ended badly for them, and Calico told her not to let the sun go down with her still on planet.

But you didn't come all this way to talk about the inner workings of a defunct pirate band. No, you want to know what happened out there. You want to know just how Calico's Cutthroats met their end, don't ya?

Well, we'd come to the conclusion that the Chaos March was getting a little too hot for our liking. I know that the old adage is 'in confusion, there is profit', but it was getting to the point where we were more likely to be caught in the crossfire of better armed opponents, so we decided to ship-out for the Deep Periphery. Calico had a lead on some kind of mining operation that the JàrnFòlk had supposedly set-up between Hamar and Alfrk. Some desolate little mud-ball that didn't even have a name, but was apparently rich in... look, all I know is that it was apparently worth spending the better part of a year getting to, assuming that we could get our hands on it and find a buyer.

And I tell ya, if you think space travel can drive you crazy, try it with a crew who's most of the way there in the first place. It was only the fact that Calico had made his wife, Pollyanna, Master-At-Arms, that kept us from killing each other. Now, there was a woman you didn't want to get one the wrong side of, even out of that blood-red suit of _Sylph_ battle armour she'd pulled off of a dead Diamond Shark, so it wasn't too hard for her to keep us in line.

We were getting close to going at each other, 'Pretty Polly' be damned, when we arrived in system. It was a fairly typical F-type main-sequence star with four planets, the outer two being a gas and ice giant respectively, but it was the second planet, circling on the inner edge of the habitable zone, that was our prize. Now Calico had done his homework, or, at least, paid someone to do it for him, so we had a pretty good idea what we were getting into. The planet was hot and dry with a lot of tectonic activity that brought a lot of rare elements to the surface. The JàrnFòlk had set up an open mine at the end of a steep-sided box canyon, digging into the side of the mountain for all that lovely mineral wealth. But the local geography and weather meant that they couldn't land DropShips too close to the mind, and instead had to ship out the ore to a makeshift spaceport some distance away.

And that meant that there were regular convoys of ore just waiting to be scooped up!

Not that they weren't ready for trouble: each convoy had an escort, but nothing we couldn't deal with: the JàrnFòlk may fight like the devil himself hand-to-hand or in space, but in BattleMechs? Not their natural habitat. Word was they had a company of light and medium 'Mechs, but never sent more than a single lance out on escort duty. Certainly nothing a company of heavies with a couple of assaults couldn't handle.

The _Lady Luck_ set down in a maze of canyons that were probably ranging rivers in the wet season, but it was the hight of summer, so they were as dry as a nuns gusset. And it was deep enough to hide a _Union_ like the _Lady_ , meaning that the JàrnFòlk had no way of knowing we where there unless they literally stumbled over us. Did make it a little interesting finding our way out to the ambush point, but that's all part of the life. And, again, Calico had done his homework: we knew the rout the convoy would be taking and roughly when it was due, so we had time to slip into position but didn't have to spend too long sitting there with our thumbs up our arses. Calico sent Polly off to keep an eye on the mine, then shadow the convoy, make sure there weren't any unpleasant surprises waiting for us when we sprung _our_ unpleasant surprise.

And looking back, that should have been our first clue that something wasn't right.

I've seen pretty much every kind of active and passive defence known to man, torn through or bypassed most of 'um, one time or another, but what those JàrnFòlk had set up was something different. Most obvious was the wall: big enough to bide a small DropShip behind, and made out of what passed for trees on that god forsaken rock. Big ones they were, too, thick and hard enough to stop even a medium laser, but they'd collected enough to completly enclose the end of the canyon with a big gate in the middle. They had weapons emplacements along the top: not true turrets, but enough to protect the crews from a fair bit. Then there were massive wooden stakes, effectively entire trees, buried at a 45-degree angle and the exposed ends sharpened to a point that looked like they could impale a BattleMech. Certainly not the kind of defences you'd normally expect, even that far out into the outer darkness. The wall was topped by a geometric dome made of wood, cable and netting, each joint crowned by another spike. It wasn't camouflaged, but it was obviously intended to keep someone, or something, out.

Well, the convoy moved out on time, but at a far slower pace than we expected. They seemed to be hugging a low ridge line that would eventually bring them to where we were waiting, but it wasn't the fastest or the most direct rout, not by a long shot. And they were putting out enough active sensors to spot an honest man in government and chatting away on unencrypted radios, but it was clear from what little we could translate that they weren't looking for us, or pirates in general, just... there was this word they kept using, something in Japanese, but with Two-Hands gone, none of us spoke it well enough to translate it.

Anyway, we got ready as they got closer: soon as they passed a predetermined point, we'd burst out on them, guns blazing... which actually worked better than expected, because they straight up surrendered immediately. As in, didn't fire a single shot in defence. Instead, they laid down their weapons and begged us not to shoot.

Well, that's not exactly true: they pleaded with us not to make so much noise.

Now, while we were happy to have gotten the prize without so much as a paper-cut, something about just how easily we'd one had their hairs on the back of my neck standing on end, and I could tell that Calico felt the same, because he ordered us to keep our guns trained on the JàrnFòlk while Polly inspected the bootie. And sure enough, it was exactly what we'd been expecting. More of it, in fact. Enough to keep the Cutthroats going for at least a year, even after giving everyone their cut. And the JàrnFòlk, well, they just wanted us to take it and go, quietly.

But the way they kept asking us to keep the noise down was getting to some of the others, and one, a real nasty piece of work who went by Reinhardt, he decided to 'show them who was in charge', so he raised the arms on his _JagerMech_ and let rip a long burst with all four autocannons. Couple of the others followed suit, taking the opportunity to blow off a little steam by shooting at the sky. Spent she'll casings clattered to the ground in heaps while the air boiled with the heat of discharging lasers. Me? I was watching the JàrnFòlk, and they were watching the skies, but not out of fear of the display my companions were putting on. Backing up my _Orion_ , I looked over to Calico: his _BattleMaster_ hadn't moved, and I didn't know him well enough to work out what was going on in his head.

That's when the first red blip appeared on my radar plot: High up but diving down fast. I tried to get a better lock, but my tracking system just wasn't up to the task. I shouted a warning over the company wide frequency, but nobody was listening, even as I moved into a defensive stance, and more red blips started to appear, converging on our location. But the JàrnFòlk were paying attention, and had started to scatter, looking for what cover they could find, even as the first distant roar echoed over the sound of weapons fire. I looked up to see something approaching, and snapped off a quick shot from my large laser, missing by a country mile.

It, however, didn't miss.

Flame enveloped Reinhardts _JagerMech_ from head to toe, the shock staggering him back even as he was hit by the downdraft of his attacker passing overhead. I got a glimpse of green and black, and then it was gone. Panic and confusion exploded among the Cutthroats, Calico screaming over the radio, trying to issue orders amid the chaos. Then something swooped down, knocking over a JàrnFòlk _Commando_ , sending it crashing to the ground with massive rents in its rear armour.

They call it the 'Mad Minute', but there's no real hard rules about how long it can last, even if the mad part is selling it lightly. It happens when a group of soldiers find themselves surrounded and under attack. Training goes out the window as adrenaline and instinct kick in, and you fill the air with as much firepower as you can in a desperate bid to kill the enemy before they kill you. Even elite House troops can fall victim to it, so you can imagine how easy it was for a bunch of strung-out pirates to loose any sense of cohesion and just go nuts. Nobody was really looking who or what they were shooting at, and there was a fair bit of not-so-friendly fire, my own 'Mech taking a couple of hits. I saw a _Warhammer_ rip itself apart as a burst of flame enveloped it and set of the ammo for its SRM Launcher, and a _Crusader_ stagger around, writhed in flames, obviously on the point of shut-down due to excessive heat.

Then one of them landed, and I suddenly realised what the JàrnFòlk had been squawking about, that word in Japanese that none of us understood.

 _Doragon_.

Or, if you prefer, dragon.

Yeah, roll your eyes as much as you like: just another crazy old spacer high off his tits on pain medication to combat the cancer eating his body from the inside out, spinning a yarn for gullible dirt-siders. But think on this; someone a lot higher up the chain of command for whoever you work for sent you all the way out here to the arse-crack of the universe to talk to me. Someone knows, or at least suspects, what I saw out there and wanted to hear my side straight from the Archons mouth, before it's too late. _That_ someone believes in dragons.

So yeah, it was a dragon. Or at least as close to one as I've ever heard of. It must have been a good twenty meters long, end to end, and about half of that was tail. It was hunched over slightly, wings folded back. God, it was an ugly beastie, no denying it: all green and grey scales, head topped with a spiked crest. But the yes, ye gods, the eyes on it! Ever look at a bird or prey? Or a big predator of any kind? They got a way of looking at you, like they're already planning on how they're going to cut you open to get to the good bits inside? That's how that demon looked at me: like it was ready to rip my 'Mech apart and eat me alive.

So, perhaps you can understand why I gave it a long blast from my autocannon: the KaliYama may be an older design, but they're almost legendary for their reliability, and 150mm HE rounds can still ruin anyone's day if your aim is good. Well, that close my aim didn't have to be good, and I traced a line of hits from its gut to left shoulder. But sure as I'm sitting here before you now, I may as well have fired a kids BB gun at it. The Good Lord himself only knows what that bastards scales were made of, but they shrugged off most of the hits with no apparent damage. It was only the last one from the burst, the only one that actually hit the shoulder, that seemed to do any real damage. And even then, I only seemed to piss it off.

It clocked its head back, opened wide and belched forth a fireball that struck my _Orion_ just below the cockpit, sending all the heat gages instantly into the red. Don't ask me how it did it, but it did and it damn near killed me: only the CASE system I'd used my cut from the last job I pulled to pay for saved me, but at the cost of turning my LRM launcher to so much molten slag and terminally jamming the autocannons feed, leaving me with just a twitchy SRM-4 and my lasers, none of which I dared use with the heat gages all buried in the deep red. I was one dead pirate.

It was Calico Jack himself who saved me: back when he'd founded the band, old Captain Plank had come across this infamously crazy Cappelan arms dealer named Boris "the Blade" Yurinov selling knock-off 'Mech scale swords on the black market. While far from Snake build quality, they were functional, and Plank insisted that every 'Mech under his command capable of doing so carried one. That were real pig-stickers, to be sure, but they scared the shit out of most people, especially when you had someone like Two-Hands living up to her name and dual wielding them. The practice had somewhat fallen out of favour since Planks death, but Calico's _BattleMaster_ still had its sword.

The dragon, and I'm going to keep calling it that, no matter how many times you roll your eyes, the dragon must have heard him coming, because it started to turn towards him. That meant that his first swing only grazed its arm, but the follow up blast from his lasers and machin-guns made it cock its head to the right, opening up its neck. The angle was wrong for another sword swipe, so Calico decided to pistol whip it with his PPC, and seven tons of blut force trauma is still seven tons of blunt force trauma. _That_ the dragon definitely felt, and it went down, letting out an ear piercing roar on pain. Calico looked ready to finish the job with the sword when, well...

The creatures we'd been fighting, if you can call flailing about like a bunch of drunks fighting, we about as big as a _Zues_ , but what turned up next? Well, I'd bet anything you'd care to mention that it was their mother, come to see what her kids were up to.

It was big; so big the ground shook when it landed. I had to fight to keep my 'Mech upright, but I could see the broken remains of a blood-red suit of _Sylph_ battle armour clutched in one hand, the evil looking talons punched right through it. Calico only just had time to look up in surprise before it let him have it right in the face. And this flame was white hot, almost like a blowtorch, and it melted the head right off his _BattleMaster_ , quick as you like. Then the ready ammo in the SRM launcher went up, blowing the entire left arm, sword and all, clean off as the rest of the ' _Masters_ ammo started to cook-off. The engine must have gone into emergency shut down, as it toppled over backwards and lay still on the ground.

And that was the end of James "Calico Jack" Rackham.

I hit the chicken switch and rode my command couch out of there, managing to angle myself away from the action, putting as much distance as possible between myself and the last stand of Calico's Cutthroats. Parafoil deployed clean, and I was able to coaxs another kilometer out if it before I touched down, but evidently the dragons were more interested in playing with the still firing 'Mechs, because they didn't seem to notice me at all. I grabbed my survival kit and started back towards the _Lady Luck_ , only to encounter a JàrnFòlk scout on a hover bike heading back the other way. Probably not realising I was a pirate, they stopped, no doubt to ask what had happened. What they got was two centre of mass and another through the head before they'd even had a chance to say a word. I grabbed their goggles and dust mask before hightailing it out of there.

Pitty, really: she was a bit of a looker.

I managed to find my way back to the _Lady_ just before dusk, a couple of the others trailing in later, mostly like me in vehicles they'd taken from the JàrnFòlk. Not one of our 'Mechs made it back. With Calico and Polly dead, that put the DropShips captain in charge, and he gave the order to burn hard for orbit, turning our fusion drive on that god forsaken rock and never looking back.

That was fifteen years ago, and the devil take my soul, I'm thankful for every day that puts it further in the past.

 **The End**


	13. The Last Spartan

_With special thanks to Giovanni Blasini for reasons that will become clear to those who know his work._

 **The Last Spartan**

They called it Task Force Leonidas, and to the history books, it's a small footnote in the grander story of Operation LIBERATION.

You see, the old Star League Defense Force loved their tech: they had to have the best, the newest, the shiniest toys available. Didn't matter if it was a combat knife or a battleship, they were obsessed with showing off just how powerful the Terran Hegemony was. And nothing showed just how big your package was like warships. BattleMechs and infantry may take a planet, but it was warships that got them there and made sure nobody rained on their parade. And the Star League had the biggest fleet of the best ships humanity has ever known. They played by Stiener Rules: you brought a Corvette, they'd bring a Cruiser. You bring a Cruiser, they'd bring a Battleship.

In fact, their entire naval doctrine can be summed up with just four words: kill it with battleships.

The Star League Defense Force had the money, the manpower and the will to simply drown their opponents with massive firepower. Not to say that they were a blunt instrument, but when you own a hammer worthy of Thor, it's real tempting to look at every problem like it's a nail. But even they had their limits. Space is kind of big, after all, and a flotilla of warships guarding System A aren't covering System B. And if you spread them out too thinly, you risk being defeated piecemeal by an enemy able to gather sufficient forces to overcome each individual detachment one at a time. The old 'death by a thousand cuts' problem. The Star League decided they needed something new, something that would tip the balance of power back in their favour. They wanted to make the idea of invading the Hegemony simply unthinkable, something that would allow them to redeploy their massive fleet in such a way that nobody within a thousand light years of Terras would dream of defying the will of House Cameron.

Because while the other Great Houses of the Star League thought they were playing chess, House Cameron was playing Paradox-Billiards-Vostroyan-Roulette-Fourth Dimensional-Hypercube-Chess-Strip Poker the entire time.

The Star League had the ability to alter the rotational velocity of planets and weld continents together, and while all the hospitals and schools they built across the Inner Sphere and Periphery may have been good PR, they were the velvet glove that hid a fist forged from a neutron star. And when they put all that brain power into killing something, that something tended to end up very, _very_ dead. Enter the M-5 " _Caspar_ " Capital Drone, an AI controlled warship the size of a destroyer but packing enough highly concentrated death to ruin anyone's day. With no need to stock food, supplies, or provide crew quarters, the ships were upgraded to include a weapons suite more common to a battlecruiser. As the ships were not hindered by human limitations, they could outmaneuver the manned vessels they were designed to attack. Using the advanced computers provided by Nirasaki Computers Collective and control systems from Ulsop Robotics, the _Caspars_ could out-fight any manned ship in space. The concept was that a star system protected by _Caspars_ as part of an integrated Space Defense System would be, to all intents and purposes, immune to the threat of invasion.

 _Caspars_ did not need to eat, drink or sleep. So long as they were kept supplied and maintained by their equally automated command stations, they could operate round the clock. A _Caspar_ couldn't be bargained with. It couldn't be reasoned with. It didn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely would not stop, ever, until you were an expanding cloud of debris. It was a suit of armour that the Star League was going to put around the entire Hegemony, the ultimate defence against any imaginable attack from without.

Unfortunately, when that attack finally came, it came from _within_.

One of the first things that rat-bastard Amaris did was take full control of the Space Defense System of every Hegemony world that had one. Entire fleets of Cameron loyalist warships were lost, like bears set upon by wolves. It didn't matter how many drones it took to take down a warship, because they were far cheaper and easier to replace. Only the _Charlotte Cameron_ was able to put up a real fight, but that's a story for another time. So now this ultimately defense was in the hands of a mad man. The _Caspars_ didn't know any better, least, most of them didn't.

There are stories, okay, about a few experimental models that were effectively self aware, who tried to fight back against the Usurper. Most died under the guns of their less intelligent kin, while the others... we'll, they say one pointed itself at the Andromeda galaxy, burned all its fuel to reach near relativistic speed and shut itself down. The rest just vanished into the out darkness. But, again, a story for another time.

There's an old hypothetical question: what happens when an immovable object finds itself in the path of an unstoppable force?

Because if the _Caspars_ were the ultimate defence, then the Star League Defense Force was the ultimate weapon, a giant creature made of armour and weapons, born from your darkest nightmares. Aleksandr Kerensky was a man driven by the sure and certain knowledge that the universe would be better off without Stefan Amaris around to use up perfectly good oxygen. His army was willing to follow him into the gates of hell if so ordered, and that's what going up against the _Caspars_ was like. The drones didn't understand politics, couldn't comprehend that their orders were coming from a power mad murder. All they knew was that they had been told that the incoming SLDF forces were the enemy, and that meant only one thing: kill them with fire. Every system protected by _Caspars_ became a meat-grinder, with dozens of ships and thousands of people lost just to reach orbit. It was a fight even the SLDF could not win, so Kerensky had his best minds work on finding a way to defeat the drones without having to throw bodies at them.

And they did, sort of. They found a way to jam the long-range communications links between the individual drones and their command nodes. Cut off, these drones could often be ignored as they just sat there, waiting for orders that would never come. Unfortunately, this only worked on long-range communications, meaning that _Caspars_ closer to the nodes would still fight, and the Sol system had been seeded with control nodes, meaning that, when the time finally came to liberate Terra, most of the 250 drones protecting it would be active. But Terra had to fall; the Usurper had to die for his crimes, and that meant sending the Star League Defense Force into the jaws of death.

And that brings us back to Task Force Leonidas.

Kerensky assembled a flotilla of forty warships, led by the captured _Stefan Amaris_ class battleship SLS _Chieftain_ , and gave them the task of gutting the fleet of _Caspars_ defending Sol. It was a suicide mission, a fact that wasn't kept from the crews, but even then, less than thirty members of the eight thousand men and women serving aboard those ships opted to back out of the mission when Kerensky gave them the choice. These people knew full well what was being asked of them, but they also knew that every day Amaris was left in charge of the Hegemony meant thousands more dead civilians. They were soldiers; they had sworn to give their lives if necessary in defence of the Star League and everything it stood for. And when the time came to fulfil their oaths, they would not be found wanting.

While the rest of Kerenskys massive armada attacked the main jump-points, the ships of Task Force Leonidas jumped into the L1 point between Sol and Mars, instantly drawing the attention of the _Caspars_ in the area. Fearing that this was the prelude to an attack on Mars, Amaris ordered more and more drones in, but he didn't give them time to build up sufficient force to deal with the Task Force. Instead he sent them in as they arrived, meaning that many went in alone, while others attacked in twos and threes. The ships of Task Force Leonidas ripped these first few drones apart with overwhelming firepower for three hours, until thirty _Caspers_ arrived at once.

That's when the gloves came off.

Nuclear fire enveloped the first wave of the _Caspars_ as the ships of Task Force Leonidas unleashed a barrage of missiles in the 250-650 kiloton range. Sixteen drones were destroyed outright, with more crippled or badly damaged. The planners had expected the drones to break off at this, but it only spurred the _Caspers_ on, as to their simple AI minds, Task Force Leonidas had just made itself the single biggest threat in the entire system. Singling out the ships that had fired the nukes, they doubled-down, going into what, had they been crewed by humans, could only be called a frenzy. Star League ships started to fall under the withering fire, and that brings us to the subject of this story.

The SLS _Jervis Bay_ was a _Congress_ class frigate that had seen almost two centuries of service, mostly escorting supply convoys around the Inner Sphere. But the fighting to retake the Hegemony had taken its toll on the _Jervis Bay_ , and she had suffered severe damage to her interplanetary drive in the fighting above New Earth. Indeed, there was some debate as to whether or not she'd even be able to make the jump with the rest of the flotilla. But her engineers patched the damage as best they could, the crew petitioning General Kerensky for a spot on the mission: knowing that their ship would likely be scrapped once the war was over, they wapnted to give her the chance to go out in a blaze of glory.

But fate is a fickle mistress, and had other plans for the _Jervis Bay_.

The jump into the Sol system had crippled the frigates drive. Knowing that retreat was not an option, the crew of the _Jervis Bay_ decided that they would sell their lives dearly, and set about destroying every single _Caspar_ that came within range. For two days, the crew of the _Jervis Bay_ and the rest of Task Force Leonidas fought like their namesake, destroying or crippling over a hundred _Caspars_ before the last ship, the cruiser _Sovetskii Soyuz_ , was finally destroyed.

But the fate of the _Jervis Bay_ remains... contested.

The official after-action report by the Star League Defense Force states that it suffered damage to its reactor shielding, inflicting lethal radiation doses on the crew. They were ordered to pull out of the fighting, but instead on remaining on station, those not killed outright taking massive doses of pain killers and combat stimulates to remain functional. Then damage to the _Chieftain_ crippled its starboard point-defences, a potentially catastrophic opening that the _Caspars_ pounced on. All guns firing definitely, the crew of the _Jervis Bay_ redlined their already damaged engines in a bid to cut off the drones and buy the flagship time to effect repairs. It was a desperate move, as it caused a fresh surge of radiation to envelope the ship, killing most of the surviving engineering crew as they mand their posts to the last. Her hull torn and venting atmosphere, the _Jervis Bay_ threw itself at the enemy.

And then _something_ happened.

Officially, the _Jervis Bay_ was destroyed when her reactor finally lost containment, the resulting explosion destroying a nearby _Casper_ and badly damaging two more, while leaving no wreckage of the frigate. However, long-range sensor records indicate that the IR flair that preceded the disappearance of the frigate was closer to what one would expect from a catastrophic miss-jump, leaving many to speculate that the damaged reactor sent a power surge through the damaged jump-core, triggering it. Many who subscribe to this theory believe that the _Jervis Bay_ was destroyed by the resulting energy release.

And that was the end of Task Force Leonidas: with the remaining _Caspars_ delt with, General Kerensky sent ships to recover the pitifully few lifeboats and escape pods to be found, and the twisted, broken remains of the flotilla and the drones they had given their lives to destroy were left to settle into a solar orbit, a tomb for those who did their duty until the very end. No attempts were made to salvage the wrecks before the Exodus, and they quickly faded from common knowledge. That was until around twenty years later, when an enterpriseing group of Belters decided to see if there was anything worth recovering from the hulks. Now, many might consider this akin to grave robbing, but let's not forget that three centuries of war have left their mark on the known galaxy, and battlefield salvage is part of everyday life. At least the Belters were more interested in simple survival rather than killing.

Well, next thing anybody knows, they're sending out a distress signal, yelling that an unknown warship suddenly jumped-in and started firing on them. ComStar, who by that time, had taken control of the Sol system, dispatched a rescue mission, expecting to find nothing more than a few idiots who'd hit some debris and panicked. What they found was a crew of experienced spacers in a ship that showed signs of having taken damage from capital grade weapons. Fearing that one of the Successor States was making a secret play for Terra, ComStar deployed the CSV _Alacrity_ , one of the few active warships in their possession at the time. The _Vincent_ class corvette approached the Task Force Leonidas debris field with the crew at battlestations, only to be surprised by an unidentified _Congress_ class frigate suddenly jumping in, firing upon them without making any attempts to communicate. The _Alacrity_ made use of its superior acceleration to break contact, and the unknown warship seemingly jumped back out again.

Twice more the corvette would approach the wrecked ships, but no matter the angle they chose, the _Congress_ would appear and open fire.

After this, modified Mark 39 _Voidseeker_ Attack Drones were deployed, broadcasting various IFF transponder codes, but no matter what, the Congress always appeared and destroyed them. Long-range observations of the frigate showed that it taken massive damage, but showed clear signs of operating under human control. One drone was able to survive long enough to take a close-up image of the hull, from which the ships registration number could be seen: F40. A search of surviving records identified it as the _Jervis Bay_.

All subsequent attempts to contact the _Jervis Bay_ , including by former Star League officers who knew the crew, failed. Any attempt to approach the Task Force Leonidas wrecks invited immediate attack from the frigate. All attempts to discover just how the shop was able to jump in and out so frequently failed, as did trying to plot where it was between appearances. In the end, ComStar simply deployed navigation bouys to make the area as a serious hazard to navigation and left. The _Jervis Bay_ would not be sighted again for almost three centuries, until the Word of Blake, having recently wrested control of Terra from their former brothers, sent an expedition to inspect the wrecks. The Belters living in the system tried to warn them off, worried that they'd awaken the 'Last Spartan' as they called it.

The Word ignored them, and lost five ships with all hands.

More ships were sent, including warships from their small but growing fleet: they were all attacked relentlessly until destroyed or driven off, the _Jervis Bay_ seemingly taking no damage. Countless theories have been put forth since the first encounter with the _Jervis Bay_ as to what exactly happened to the ship, and how it is able to appear and disappear seemigly at will, always when someone approaches the ships of Task Force Leonidas. Scientists have speculated that the power surge caused the jump-drive to create a window in spacetime, and that the _Jervis Bay_ and her crew are forever living out their last, glorious charge in defence of their long dead comrades. They have plenty of big words and charts to back up their theories, but the Belters have a far simpler answer.

They say that the Last Spartan is standing eternal vigial of the grave of Task Force Leonidas, and will strike down any who seek to desecrate their tomb.

 **The End**


	14. Incubus

_With thanks to Chris "The Frozen Guy" O'Farrell and gladiusone for letting me play with some of their toys ;)_

 **Incubus**

Don't be surprised if you've never heard of Port Moresby: it's arguably the Outworld Alliances best kept secret.

You see, back in the day, the Star League found themselves in desperate need of a secure shipyard closer to the action than the Hermegony boarders, but didn't exactly trust any of the other member states not to try and get a look at all the advanced tech Royal units had if they used one of their shipyards. So they set up a number of hidden anchorages around the edge of the Inner Sphere, little boltholes their ships could go to if needed. The biggest was supposedly somewhere within the Federated Sun's, but there's no evidence that it still exists.

Port Moresby was created, to put it bluntly, by wedging a damaged _Newgrange_ class yardship of the same name into a planetoid big enough to have a semblance of gravity, but not enough to cause a hindrance to JumpShip and Warship repairs. The facility was further expanded upon by excavating much of the planetoid, hollowing out a number of large chambers to act as cargo bays, machine shops, crew facilities and even extensive hydroponics. They even found room for a couple of counter-rotating grav-decks, allowing the crew to at least spend some time is something approaching normal gravity. There was space for massive weapons emplacements dotted around the surface, mostly hidden inside craters and crevices, but they'd been stripped decades before the Alliance Military Corps took control of the station, and wouldn't be replaced until after we joined with the Ravens.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I was nineteen when I first shipped out to Port Moresby: straight out of basic training, my head still filled with dreams of becoming a hot-rod rocket god of precision and strength, tear-assing across the cosmos and hunting for heaven. Well, my first six weeks pealing and washing vegetables in the galley put a stop to that. Not everyone is born to be gods own gift to the AMC. No, some of us are born to be small cogs in a far bigger machine, but that's not to say we're any less important. And after six months of doing what I was told and keeping my mouth shut, I was able to get myself transferred to the quartermasters office as a very junior supply clerk. Still unlikely to impress the ladies, but at least it was less mind-numbing.

Back then, Port Moresby was really just a massive logistics hub for the entire Ramora Province, and as such the Quatermasters office was always over-worked and under-staffed, so I often found myself trying to do three things at once. Almost half the station had been closed off due to lack of money and personnel needed to keep it up and running, and most of what was left was just warehousing dedicated to making sure that any ship to pull in to dock could be resupplied and back out again before anyone tracking our fleet movements was able to work out where we were. And believe me, we had no end of briefings about just how much the Davions or Kurita or ComStar would just love to get their hands on an extra shipyard, even one as barley functional as Port Moresby. The only outsiders we did on occasion see were a small group of JàrnFòlk who seemed to have their own reasons for straying so far from home. They were a good source of information and hard to find luxury goods, so as long as they kept their mouths shut about where they were going, HQ back on Alpheratz was willing to look the other way.

The store rooms were massive, and by that I mean big enough to hold a DropShip with room to spare. Most of the heavy lifting was carried out by these crazy but utterly irreplaceable _Harvester Ant_ IndustrialMechs that had been almost completly rebuilt to operate as LoaderMechs in microgravity, the combines replaced with basic manipulators and the engines with power cells. Last thing you want is something belching out God knows what in a closed environment like a space station. But there was still a labyrinth of smaller store rooms and cargo bays dedicated to handling smaller items, and more often then not, that meant the careful application of brute force. And I do mean careful: just because you're in microgravity doesn't mean that something suddenly possesses only a fraction of its mass.

After all, there's a reason why Sir Isaac Newton's name is still known, and on occasions cursed, over a thousand years after his death.

So anyways: big place, lots of dark rooms and nowhere near enough people. Pretty much like every other depot I've seen since signing up. And like everywhere else I've served, the old timers like to haze the fresh meat. This is a universal fact, as much a law as anything Sir Isaac ever came up with, and no amount of regulations will change that. But over time, you start to grow a thicker skin, become a little more cynical, and it stops getting to you, until the datly you find yourself doing it to someone else. But Port Moresby was a little different: there they outright tell you during your orientation briefing that some of the things you'll hear stories about actually did happen. Stories like someone opening a sealed hatch to try and take a short-cut and finding themselves trying to breathe vacuum on the other side. Because, like I said, it's a really big place and we only just had enough maintenance staff to keep the basics running.

Long story short, assume that any warning signs, even those written by hand, are there for a good reason.

Yes, even the one that says "beware of the Leopard".

Don't ask.

Anyways, I'd been on Port Moresby for about two years when I was sent to retrieve something or another from one of the more distant store rooms. I double checked to make sure that it wasn't another 'glass hammer' gag, and set out on the long and boring treck through the identical passageways until I reached the indicated room. Turning on the lights, I was happily surprised to discover that only half of them had stopped working, so I didn't have to use the flashlight clipped to my belt to find my way around. I synced my noteputer with the manifest and made my way to the appropriate shelf. Only what I was looking for wasn't there. The box was there, sure, but it was empty. Now this isn't exactly uncommon anywhere: someone takes something and either forgets to put it back or puts it in the wrong place, so I checked a few of the other boxes to see if it had simply been misplaced, but came up with nothing. Procedure for a situation like that was to call up the Quatermaster's office and see if there was a possible replacement somewhere else, but the stations intercom system was in about as good a shape at the rest of it, so that meant backtracking a fair bit.

Now, back when it had been a Star League outpost, they'd had a couple of hundred little drones scuttling about, doing the kind of basic repair work that even a green AsTech could be trusted not to completly FUBAR, but the station had been abandoned for about two centuries before the AMC stumbled upon it, and nobody had been around to do any maintenance on the maintenance drones. By the time we took up residence, there was just one drone left operational in the entire station, and, well...

Nobody really understands his programming, and a few little _oddities_ have sprung up, resulting in what could be considered a personality. He, and yes, we all refer to it as a 'he', tends to be a bit skittish around people he doesn't know and prefers to be left alone to do his job without interference. He's basically a mascot for Port Moresby, with someone, no one will admit to who, even painting a caricature of him on the hatch of the maintenance bay he uses to recharge. Anyone who suggests taking him apart to look under the hood finds themselves on the first ship headed to the nastiest posting the chief engineer can think of, and they rend to be very imaginative.

It was while searching for a working intercom that I stumbled upon the little guy: he was hanging in the middle of a wide passageway, slowly spinning, its little tracks whirring helplessly. I thought it was kind of odd, as he had little magnets built into his tracks that usually kept him firmly in place, so it was hard to imagine a situation where he'd become so helpless. Now pretty much none of you reading this are going to have encountered any thing nearly as advanced as that little bot, so if you want to imagine the way he looked at me with those two big camera eyes of his, imagine a kitten stuck up a tree and you're in the same general area. It's hard to describe just how emotive he could be, given that the most he could do was make little bleeps to warn you of his presence, but it was clear he was desperate for help. So, bracing myself against one wall, I waited until he was pointed the right direction, then gave him a push. He impacted the far wall with a clang, then rocked back and forth on his tracks a few times to make sure that the magnets had a good grip, then bleeped appreciatively at me.

"Just be more careful in future." I warned him with a smile, "I may not be there to rescue you next time."

He responded with a series of musical notes, then headed off down the hall, happily trundling along what was generally considered to be a wall as it he was talking a stroll in the park.

Eventually finding a working intercom, I called up my supervisor and told him about the missing equipment. I then took a step back from the speaker as he cursed the air blue like only a veteran spacer can, before he finally informed me that the only alternative was on the far side of the station, so he'd send someone else to go get it. Which meant I could clock-off half an hour early, which was nice because it was date night with one of the LoaderMech jockeys, and it gave me time to hit the shower before changing.

But you didn't come here to hear about how I met my wife, now did you?

Well, it turned out that Port Moresby had a long history of equipment and supplies going missing. Not exactly unheard of, I know, but a station like that is pretty much a closed environment, with none of the usual opportunities for an enterprising individual or group to sell off some inventory to make a little extra cash on the side. Any large organisation has long ago accepted such losses, and just worked towards keeping them down to a reasonable level. That's not to say that anyone caught with their hands in the proverbial cookie jar wasn't beaten around the head with a hardback copy of the Uniform Code of Military Justice until they saw more stars than there are in the Alliance.

But, by all rights, Port Moresby should have seen less 'shrinkage' than most bases, but we were actually slightly above average. Now base command and HQ tended to put this down to a combination of bad records keeping and the base just being too damn big for us to keep track of everything. But nobody wanted to send more people out to help us, because that would increase the risk of some foreign power locating the station. Which was kind of crazy, as almost no one serving there knew where it was.

Oh, you want to talk about crazy? I got hit-on by this drunk Mercenary once, and he bragged about how he'd had jump-jets mounted on the arms of his 'Mech so he could perform 'rocket punches'. Guy was a complete lunatic, and even if I wasn't a lesbian, there was no way in hell I would have gone home with him that night. Seem to recall I hooked up with the barmaid that night. Oh, to be young, free and single again...

Please don't tell my wife I said that.

So, anyways, things had a habit of going missing, or not being where you left them, and there wasn't enough people around to account for a lot of it. And that's where the stories go started. Not a lot to do somewhere like Port Moresby; limited recreational activities and a bar that strictly enforced your quota... well, not much else to do off duty but stand around a pool table and talk. The station had no HPG at the time, another thing the Ravens would eventually bring with them, so it was a bit difficult to talk sports, and everyone knew everyone, so trying to brag about your love life could easily backfire on you. So that left... stories.

Kind of like the one I'm telling you now.

They'd start off like you'd expect: something you heard from a guy who'd heard it from some DropShip pilot who's brother was a MechWarrior who'd been there. Tall tails to tell in the small hours while you tried to make your last drink of the evening last until dawn. And I'm sure you've heard plenty, but not about Port Moresby. Because, with such a small crew, chances are you know the person the story was about and could ask them to confirm or deny it. That means they tend to be a little closer to the mark. Now, a lot of these stories were about people doing something stupid, or some bit of LostTech not working as expected, but there were a few that were, _different_. As I've said, most of the station was closed off, unused and unexplored, but there was always a few brave or foolish people who'd use their downtime to go exploring. Some did it for the novel experience, some looking for LostTech to sell, others because it got them away from everyone else for a little 'private time', if you catch my drift.

So my friend Tex starts talking about this time his roommate Lenny talked him into checking out what the station schematics said was quarters for visiting crew. The idea was that maybe they left something of value behind when they left that they could sell when they next got leave. Now while the higher ups didn't exactly approve of these little treasure hunts, they knew that there was no way to stop them short of placing Marines at every access point, and our detachment was far too small for that. So instead they insisted that anyone going hunting had to take a second person with them, and inform the duty commander exactly where they were planning to go. That way at least any search party would have an idea where to look for the bodies.

So Tex and Lenny grab a couple of flashlights, a box of glow-sticks to mark their path, and head off into the great unknown. And it wasn't easy going; even the little maintenance drone never went that far out, so they had to work their way around obstructions and jammed hatches. Eventually, they find what looked like an old mess-hall, but floating above every seat is on of the glow-sticks they'd left behind them. It took them hours to find their way back, actually bumping into the search party that had been sent looking for them, who'd been smart enough to use florescent paint on the walls to mark their progress. They make fun of Tex and Lenny, insisting that they must have somehow stirred up the air so that the glow-sticks followed them... right up until they reach the last hatch before the inhabited part of the station, when the glow-sticks and all neatly stacked in a pile before it.

My story?

OK, so say what you like, but this really happened. I was making my way along a corridor leading to the docking bay when I saw someone coming the other way. I had my head in a shipping manifest so I didn't look up properly, just glanced up enough to see a power-blue jacket with far more navy blue braid than I have even now, so I side-stepped into a hatch way and quickly threw up a salute as they passed. It wasn't until a minute or two later that I realised that the uniform they'd been wearing wasn't AMC issue, and we had no visiting ships in at the time. I spun round, but the officer had vanished. I reported the encounter to my CPO, but he shook his head and told me to forget about it.

Without a second thought, I do just that, until one day when I'm doing inventory of one of store rooms. It was real drudge work, but the boss-man made sure that everyone had to do it at some point, and my unlucky number had come up. So I'm in this store room with my noteputer, counting boxes of footpowder or whatever the hell it was; I was kind of running on automatic pilot by that point, when I happened to glance up and see a face watching me from the other side of the racking. I felt my blood run cold as I looked into a pair of eyes that were never supposed to be part of a human face: big, far bigger even than one of those souped-up aerospace pilots the Clans produce. No, these eyes took up almost a quarter of the face, and were completely black, as if there was nothing but iris. Then there was the nose, or rather the lack there of, leaving just two vertical slits between those massive eyes and a mouth that looked far too small.

We looked at each other for what felt like an eternity but couldn't have been more than a few seconds, then it hissed like a snake and suddenly vanished towards the ceiling.

I'm not ashamed to say that I bolted for the hatch like a scolded rat, the sound of whatever it was scrambling across the shelving behind me. It's not easy to run fast in microgravity, but I set a new personal record that day, moving as if the devil himself was on my heals, which for all I knew, he was. Boxes tumbled from the top of the racking, falling almost comically slowly before bursting open on the deck. I didn't even think of looking back, my own personal universe consisting of just the open hatch and the all too slowly shrinking distance between the safety it represented and myself.

Something that felt uncomfortably sharp tugged at my shoulder, and I dived through the hatch, kicking it closed as hard as I could. It snapped shut, the automatic locking mechanism engaging with a reassuring click.

I laid on the deck, trying to get my heart back down out of my throat and into my chest while I sucked down huge lung fulls of air. Then there was a worrying bleep as the someone, or _something_ , started to unlock the hatch from the other side. Pushing off with my hand, I back-peddled across the hall until my back was pressed against the other side. My heart once again pounding, I could do nothing but sit there, frozen in terror as the hatch slowly started to unlock.

A loud whirring sound came from my right, but my eyes were fixed on the hatch. I was surprised, but happily so, when the little maintenance drone rumbled up to the hatch and produced a wielding probe from one of its small arms and pressed it against the lock controls. Sparks of electricity erupted from the control panel, and the failsafe triggered, fusing the lock firmly in place.

The drone turned to look at me.

" _Just be more careful in future_." I heard my own voice coming from the little speaker built into its 'head', " _I may not be there to rescue you next time._ "

 **The End**


End file.
